Omnivoracious: New on Amazon Wire: Saving the Western Canon with Alex Ross

New on Amazon Wire: Saving the Western Canon with Alex Ross

by Tom on November 09, 2007

This week's episode of Amazon Wire features an interview our former classical music (and books) editor Tom May and I (mostly Tom!) did with Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker who, as we laugh about in the interview, was recently celebrated by one blogger in a post called (tongue just barely in cheek) "Pomo Pied Piper Saves the Western Canon." (The post, which was on New Music Box, seems to have disappeared from the web in the meantime.) Ross's new book, The Rest Is Noise, is a savvy and delicious history of 20th century classical music ("art music," "new music"--whatever you want to call something that includes Debussy and Copland and also John Cage, Duke Ellington, and Missy Elliott), told through its composers (and, to a surprising extent, its politics, with chapters on Stalin, Hitler, the Cold War, etc.). It's gotten a phenomenal response so far (reviews here, here, and here, where Ross is called "impressively omnivorous," so of course we like him), including from my good pal Josh (admittedly a Shostakovich/Sonic Youth weirdo), who inhaled it like oxygen.

Ross has a justifiably well-known blog at, yes, The Rest Is Noise, and he just noticed with amusement (I think) that we put The Rest Is Noise in our Pop Culture Top 10 in our new Best Books of 2007 store (about which more here later). We weren't sure where to put it (aside from #34 on our overall Top 100 for the year), since books about classical music fall between our usual categories (Arts & Photography? Entertainment?). But given how eager Ross is to break out of the upholstered anteroom to which classical music has lately been consigned, I think he's probably quite happy to be in Pop Culture. (Also on the blog, an illustrated post from his day in Seattle, where the fourth photo must certainly have been taken from the Starbuck's on the 40th floor of our building.)

And to answer his most frequently asked question ("Okay, I'm interested in new classical music--where should I start?"), Ross sent us an annotated list of his 10 favorite 20th-century CDs (as well as 10 favorite books on the subject too), a number of which (Shostakovich, Britten, Messaien, Golijov) he touches on in our interview. And if you want to read more about his books, see the profile of his enviable (if space-constrained) library in BookForum's latest issue. --Tom

P.S. For more from Ross, check out the lengthy back and forth he had this week on Slate with jazz critic Ben Ratliff, author of a new John Coltrane bio that I can't believe I haven't harassed someone for a copy of yet.

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