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Festival: Alex Ross Will Get You to Dig Arnold Schönberg
Filed under: New Yorker Festival Tagged: Alex Ross, events, music, New Yorker Festival, The New Yorker
Alex Ross called his late-Sunday presentation, "The Rest Is Noise: A Multimedia Tour of Twentieth-century Music," an "improvement" on his book, as he would be able to supplement the points in his narrative with musical excerpts, so that we could actually hear examples of composers' work along the way.
Make no mistake about it: Ross's presentation was fabulously successful by almost any set of criteria. Simply put, it's difficult to imagine a human being better suited to the project of explaining the tortuous path of what we might call "serious" music in the years following 1900 to a lay audience. (I can already hear the objections to that word piling up.) If Ross has any plans to reproduce his presentation elsewhere, I highly recommend catching it; it is an experience sure to benefit any enthusiast of any kind of music. If you enjoy the intentional arrangement of aural tones to achieve an effect in the listener, you will probably enjoy this. Further, it is profoundly inspiring to see the high degrees of passion, engagement, expertise, and erudition that Ross brings to the subject.
I combine fairly low affinity for what is called contemporary music (or classical music for that matter) with a high degree of exposure. Staying in the twentieth century only, I've seen operas by Janáček, Korngold, Strauss, Glass, Prokofiev, Harbison, Berg, and Britten, and maybe a couple others I can't think of right now. In all honesty, most of them had a kind of "Isn't that impressive!" impact on me without really getting me where I live.
All of which either makes me Ross's ideal audience member or the worst one imaginable—possibly both. For my part, I got a lot out of the presentation. Ross said that his goal was to "defeat any preconceptions" about twentieth-century music, and there's no doubt he succeeded in that. To take two examples at random, he was able to present both the forbidding and supposedly melody-free clangor of atonal music and the barren-sounding prospect of minimalism in a way that both was memorable and piqued the interest.
Anyway, enough of my yakking. Whaddaya say? Let’s boogie! —Martin Schneider
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Emdashes, founded in 2004, is currently written and drawn by Emily Gordon, Martin Schneider, Pollux, Jonathan Taylor, and Benjamin Chambers, as well as occasional guest contributors. (Unsigned posts through October 2008 are by Emily Gordon.)
The site is designed and maintained by House of Pretty and illustrated by Jesse Ewing for Inkleaf Studio. Additional drawings are by Carolita Johnson and Pollux (who also draws our daily comic, "The Wavy Rule"). The kissable Emdashes logo is by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.
Other writing by Emily Gordon
- Profile: Valerie Casey, Designers Accord founder, is spearheading the design of sustainability (for SXSW World; PDF, p. 20)
- Feature: Rea Irvin: visionary art director, man about town, and New Yorker founding father (for Print)
- Report: Learning to read with comic books--that are edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
- Interview: Designer Eleanor Grosch (for Print)
- Proposal: a better-designed Metrocard (for A Brief Message)
- Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
- Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Review: Does a New Republic redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Report: Eustace Tilley spruces up for The New Yorker's website redesign (for Print)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
- Micro-essay: on saving time through inspiration (for A Brief Message)
- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
- Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
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