Alex Ross author photo
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Alex Ross

Alex Ross is an American music critic and author focused on classical music, opera, and cultural history. A longtime New Yorker critic, he wrote The Rest Is Noise, Listen to This, and Wagnerism. His work has won a National Book Critics Circle Award and helped broaden public engagement with classical music.

Biografie & Werdegang des Autors

Alex Ross, born in Washington, D.C., in 1968, grew up as the son of two geologists and developed musical interests early, studying piano, trying composition, and playing oboe in school orchestras. At Harvard he studied English and American literature, graduated summa cum laude in 1990, took music with the composer Peter Lieberson, and worked at campus radio station WHRB. That combination of literary training, active listening, and historical curiosity became the basis of his later criticism. ((https://therestisnoise.com/book-faq/?utm_source=openai))

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Zitate

quote
I hate “classical music”: not the thing but the name
-Listen To This
quote
In the beginning was the Tone
-Giacinto Scelsi
quote
In Nazi Germany, music became either a weapon of hate or an opiate of indifference
-World War II Music
quote
My rage at Wednesday's events gave way to tears when I tried to imagine my mother's reaction to them
-The marginal lament of a DC native
quote
The crazy news these days is that classical music is regaining popularity
-Here we are now, entertain us
quote
It was in Paris that the liquid revolution of “Tristan und Isolde” first entered the bloodstream of the world
-The Waves
quote
Desert-bright weather in the southwestern United States has long inspired architecture that opens itself to the land and the sky
-Elemental Opera at Santa Fe
quote
An opera lover from another planet might have concluded that two different companies were sharing the same space
-The Metropolitan Opera’s Split Personality

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Stimmen der Community

"Alex Ross's massive new book is worthy of its subject"

The American Scholar

"Like all of Alex Ross's writing, it bottles that strange lightning and inspires us in turn"

Rian Johnson

"Alex Ross's extraordinary gifts as a writer... make The Rest Is Noise a complete delight"

Jean Strouse

"In this epic, extraordinary book, Alex Ross contends with the infernal logic of Wagner's legacy"

Patrick Radden Keefe

"Alex Ross has assembled a vast convocation of the artists, proponents and prophets"

Tony Kushner

"Alex Ross is one of the great civilized pleasures anywhere on any subject"

The Buffalo News

"Fortunately, Alex Ross's brilliant evocation of the composer's world more than elucidates Wagner's various mysteries"

Hilton Als

"Alex Ross has produced an introduction to twentieth-century music that is also an absorbing story of personalities and events"

Louis Menand

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