Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Alex Ross: Listen to This

Tonight on behalf of Harvard bookstore I am honored to introduce Alex Ross to discuss his second book. Listen to this. Listen to this showcases the best of Alex Ross and his writings from over a decade in the New Yorker. These 19 pieces glimmer with vibrant sketches of classical composers high school music students in Newark New Jersey and researching Bob Dylan across a six day six show stretch that took 3000 miles off the life of a rental car. Reading Listen to this. I imagined Alex Ross on a stepladder carefully handing me a bright container. I felt thrilled about learning about music again. Alex Ross has one previous book. The rest is noise. A Cultural History of music in the 20th century and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2008. Mr. Ross has been the New Yorker's music critic since 1996 and his writing is called nimble and imaginative according to The Boston Globe. As a student of Harvard University Ross studied under composer Peter Lieberson and moonlighted as a

classical and underground rock deejay for the college radio station W. HRB. Without further ado. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Alex Ross. Thank you so much to all of you for coming out and. Well no there might not be more seats up here but it's really a delight to be back here at Harvard bookstore where I read from my book. The rest is noise. Back in 2007. And it's just been an amazing experience to become an author and to have very good luck of writing a book which has drawn a lot of notice as as the rest of noise did. And I just feel extraordinarily fortunate to to have had

such good support from my publisher as well as from many many bookstores around the country as well as some fellow critics. We spoke very kindly of my work and I did go to college across the street and actually had the wonderful experience of being back on the air. Debbie HRB this afternoon for five hours five hours of afternoon concert I was announcing it. And that was I felt very good to be back on the air there and it was actually had to be HRB that I started writing about music. We had some CD reviews in the program guide and that sort of set me on the path somewhat unconsciously at first of becoming a music critic. It wasn't something that I dreamed of growing up from an early age to be a critic one day. How many children do. And if they

do I don't know if it will be a healthy thing. But but nonetheless I'm very glad with how it turned out for me and I was able to combine my two great passions when I was young for writing and for music. And I think I was extraordinarily lucky that I was able to do both at once. The rest is noise was a rather sprawling history of 20th century music and really of the 20th century through its music it took me many many years to put together. I started writing it right at the end of the 20th century and finally saw print in 2007 and this new book Listen to this is a less ambitious endeavor. It is largely based on pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker although some of them have been rewritten. And one of them is entirely new for this volume.

But nonetheless I did put a lot of heart into it and it is a very personal book for me because it expresses how I discovered myself through music and discovered so much of the world through music not only in classical music but pop music as well. I thought I'd start by reading from the very beginning of the book the first chapter. Listen to this. This is a piece that appeared in The New Yorker in 2004. I hate classical music not the thing but the name it traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music and the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today at banishes in limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity. A tour de force of anti hype. I wish there were another

name. I envy jazz people who speak simply of the music. Some jazz aficionados also call their art America's classical music and I propose a trade. They can have classical all take the music for at least a century. The music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority. Consider other names in circulation. Art music serious music great music good music. Yes the music can be great and serious but greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics. It can also be stupid vulgar and insane. Composers are artists not etiquette columnists. They have the right to express any emotion any state of mind. They have been betrayed by well-meaning acolytes who believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good one that replaces an inferior popular product. These guardians say in effect the music you love is

trash. Listen instead to our great art music. They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. The best music is the music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world. When people hear classical They think dead the music is described in terms of its distance in the present. Its difference from the mass. No wonder that stories of its imminent demise are commonplace. Newspapers recite a familiar litany of problems. Record companies are curtailing their classical divisions. Orchestras are facing deficits. The music has barely taught in public schools almost invisible and the media ignored or mocked by Hollywood. Yet the same story was told 40 60 80 years ago. Stereo Review wrote in 1969 fewer classical records are being sold because people are dying.

Today's dying classical market is what it is because 15 years ago no one attempted to instill a love for classical music in the then impressionable children who have today become the market the conductor Alfred Wallenstein wrote in 1950 the economic crisis confronting the American Symphony Orchestra is becoming increasingly acute. The German critic Hans Hines took on Schmidt wrote in 1926. Concerts are poorly attended and budget deficits grow from year to year. Laments over the decline or death of the art appear as far back as the 14th century when these sensuous melodies of ours Nova were thought to signal the end of civilization. The pianist Charles Rosen has sagely observed the death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition. The American classical audience is assumed to be a moribund crowd of the old the white the rich and the board.

Statistics provided by the National Endowment for the Arts suggests that the situation is not quite so dire. Yes the audience is older than that for any other art. The median age is forty nine but it is not the wealthiest the parterre section at the Metropolitan Opera plays host to CEOs and socialites. But the less expensive parts of the house as of this writing. Most seats in the family circle at the Met go for twenty dollars are well populated by schoolteachers proofreaders students retirees and others with no entry in the social register. If you want to see an in your face Swiss bank account display of wealth. Go look at the millionaires sitting in the skyboxes at a Billy Joel show. If security lets you. As for the graying of the audience there's no denying the general trend although with any luck it may begin to level off. Paradoxically even as the audience ages the performers keep getting younger. The musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic are on average a generation younger than the

Rolling Stones. The music is always dying never ending. It was like an ageless diva on a nonstop farewell tour coming around for one the absolutely final appearance. It is hard to name because it never really existed to begin with. Not in the sense that it stemmed from a single time or place. It has no genealogy no ethnicity. Leading composers of today hail from China Estonia Argentina Queens. The music is simply whatever composers create a long string of written down works to which various performing traditions have become attached. It encompasses the high the low Empire underground dance prayer silence noise. Composers are genius parasites. They feed voraciously on the song matter of their time in order to engender something new. They have gone through a rough stretch in the past hundred years facing external obstacles. Hitler and Stalin were amateur music critics as well as problems of their own

invention. Why doesn't anyone like our beautiful 12 tone music but they may be on the verge of an improbable Renaissance and the music may take a form that no one today would recognize. So if I go on in the opening chapter of this book to give a little memoir of my growth my upbringing as a listener I began as someone purely exclusively devoted to classical music and classical music of the Mozart Brahms variety. I wasn't listening to any ARS Nova or twentieth century music for that matter and this was a very full and emotionally rich world for me. Which of course this music

is it does express every imaginable emotion and I didn't really feel the need and didn't have the time or patience for anything else until I was well along in my teenage years she didn't make me the most popular kid in high school. But you know this is just the way it was. And. By the time I got to college and came here at Harvard I was beginning to branch out and I was becoming very interested in 20th century classical music. I tried to be a composer growing up and that didn't lead anywhere but I did really think very much about how music works from the inside and read in music history and became fascinated by the in particular by the evolution of one style to another and as you follow the evolution of styles eventually you get into the modern period and so on my show on

HRB music since 1900 it was called I went marching through the century decade by decade and made so many discoveries. And I think by my junior year sophomore junior year I was deep into the avant garde of the post-war era the the very noisy and dissonant music of Cage and Stockhausen and Xenakis and Ligeti music. That is right on the border between music and noise. And it was at this point that fellow deejays at the station started pointing out that they had music that was really constructed along very similar principles. Music that was really just as noisy and unlistenable as the classical music that I was devoted to at the time. So for example if they were if I was listening to

Stockhausen's group and there. They would say well why don't you listen to and Cecil Taylor. Or some. Peyroux. And there was at this point that my resistance to popular music or unpopular music in this case really broke down and I gave up on the assumption that I talk about it at the beginning of the essay Listen to this that classical music was the only

true province of serious and difficult musical thought. I realize that there was so much more that I had yet to know and so I started discovering popular music. And it's a it's a process this ongoing for me there still is so much that that I haven't heard or haven't really sat down and tried to understand but it was just a great joy for me to cross the border from one genre to another in that way. And what I also realized was that people my own age who had grown up with pop music and had not been exposed to classical music could cross that border moving in the opposite direction and as they proselytized to me and sort of urged me to listen to their favorite music. Pointing out the common ground with what I was already interested in I did the same and started proselytizing

for my favorite 20th century composers and a number of my friends really started to become excited about Steve Rice or John Adams or Ligeti or messy. And it was the germ of an idea that I pursued I think all through my writing in The New Yorker and also in the book. The rest is noise to show how this music that it does seem esoteric at first encounter actually has manifold links with musical cultures outside of it with culture in general and with the whole stream of 20th century history as well so I think I was sort of already at that stage moving toward the idea of writing rest. The rest is noise which was also really present. You know in

very embryonic form in the radio show that I was doing. So it's been almost a lifelong project for me to show these connections in our bigger musical culture. And you know the funny thing is it's it's rare to find classical music and popular music discussed between the covers of a single book. There are some outstanding examples that bring to mind. One is Wilfrid Mellers fantastic book music and a new found land which I believe unfortunately has gone out of print certainly deserves to be in print. An attempt by a British writer to understand American music through really its all its manifestations from composed from starting with folk music really and then composed classical music and then the blues and jazz and a

bit of rock n roll. Toward the end but it's it's quite rare to find a book that looks at music across such a wide canvas. I also think of John Rockwell who covered both classical music and pop music for The New York Times for many years. And so it was always a project that I decided I wanted to take up as well when I started writing first for The New York Times and then for The New Yorker and I'm really not sure I was all that successful at it. Particularly when it came to writing just as sort of a straight forward review of a rock show and I did this a few times when I was at the times I really found it very difficult. I lacked the language to really take it on. And I also lacked the knowledge the reference points that anyone who listened to this music seriously all their lives will instantly have to hand. I just didn't have to have that sort of

foundation of knowledge. But nonetheless I'm happy that I that I made the attempt to end some of the pieces I felt were were better than others and perhaps worth preserving so I put those in this book and there are a few shorter pieces a memorial for Kurt Cobain piece on Sonic Youth and three longer pieces on Gehrke Radiohead and Bob Dylan and I think the piece pieces on Bjork and Radiohead were you came to me more naturally because these are artists who are very aware of classical music and know quite a bit about it. Bjork trained seriously as a flutist and also as a composer to some extent and she possesses a really pretty deep knowledge of the 20th century classical repertory So there was a natural talking points that I had with her when

I started to interview her and her whole music is I feel it really is somewhere between the popular world and the classical world and exists in a category very much of its own. Otherwise I have you know a series of essays on this book on canonical classical composers Mozart Schubert Verdi and Brahms. I have profiles of musicians such as as well as a pack of Saladin and mid-scale Lucida. Seen within the context of Marlborough music the fantastic festival and music camp up in Vermont. Profile of the Alaska based composer John Luther Adams. Pieces of pieces on music education following the St.. Lawrence string quartet a young at the time quartet on the road really trying to look at musical life from many different angles

and build up a composite picture. The sort of final thing I'd like to do before answering your questions is talk a bit about this the second chapter of the book which is the new piece the one the one I wrote for listen to this is called Chicana LA mento walking blues and the idea of this piece is again to trace connections between genres among genres and across a pretty wide span of musical history and in fact that the foolish ambition that I had was to write a history of music in about 10000 words from the medieval period to the present. But through the lens a very restricted lens of a few very specific motifs and the the sort of two or three musical ideas that I follow across

that big musical expanse. One is the form known as the Chicana which was a very lively and rollicking dance which cropped up in Spanish speaking countries. Apparently originally in South America at the end of the 16th century it may have sounded something like this. So. And Skip ahead a years and you find that the Chicana has undergone a dramatic almost inexplicable transformation. And in the hands of Johann Sebastian Bach It now sounds like this a. And another motif that I follow is one that I call and

many over the centuries before me have called La mento a falling sequence of notes that very often seems to signify laments and in its basic form on the piano it sounds like this. Now this idea of a downward sliding pattern connected to lament is something that we find in many different musical cultures across the world. I'll play a few examples from Eastern Europe. Here's a chat or lament from Romania. Here's one from Hungary.

Now in a famous Renaissance Shan's saw by Yohannes Archigram dating for around 14 60 you find that same downward trudging series of four notes. This is for soon. And here it is in John Dolan's Elizabethan song flow my tears. Now this is a very interesting moment when Claudia Monteverde the great

Italian composer at the end of the 16th century or early 17th century takes that falling motif and turns it into this steadily hypnotically repeating pattern in ostinato which is Italian for obstinate. And this is a principle that derives from the dance music of the time where you found these these ostinato is constantly churning in the baselines of dancers. But Monteverdi takes repetition which often had a happy liberating connotation and makes it a symbol of sadness of lament in his lament to La Nina. You.

Can find a lot more examples from the Baroque era but I thought I'd skip ahead another couple of hundred years and you find really the exact same bass line in Ray Charles. Is. Not a lament exactly but it does signify a certain district distress and dismay in matters of love. There's a variant form of this lament figure which is the chromatic form of consecutive notes on the piano keyboard. Black and white keys. And this descending figure was again used as an ostinato

It's a practice which began in the Baroque period. It figures very memorably in the Cuccia success of box B Minor Mass where it symbolizes the sufferings of Christ on the cross. You can also hear it at the end of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. You.

Mean there's dozens more examples you can find from the classical literature the Leath that I try to make at the end of this chapter is outside of the classical arena and into popular music and specifically into the land of the blues and in Mississippi delta blues especially you keep hearing this descending chromatic figure not quite the same as the one I played before but it seems to have this same downward pull of lament attached to it. This is Willie Brown's future blues go on. Line

of course these blue Stigler's had a lasting effect on so much of the pop music and rock music that followed. Here's the beginning of one of Led Zeppelin's epic live versions of dazed and confused me or. So. That bass line is really overwhelming my pathetic little speakers that are brought along and what most fascinated me was the fact that in the 1960s and 70s you start hearing a specific form of this chromatic descent used in that ostinato fashion over and over again in the baseline of a song it suddenly starts happening around nineteen

sixty four and 1965. In the Beatles and Bob Dylan and a lot of other music from that period and all play it. Classic example which is a later song of Dylan simple twist of fate. From blood on the tracks makes me smile. She was low key. She was more in tune or. Like me. Or she.

Now one thing I really enjoyed doing in putting this book together is having set out these themes of Chicana and lament in the second chapter I inserted references to them in many of the other essays throughout the book and it's not at all an artificial thing to do since the motif is so common. And it was often used with such a specific expressive point by composers across the ages Mozart uses that at the beginning of Don Giovanni and the overture. Schubert uses it in the first movement of his final string quartet quartet in G word is like this chromatic shadow falling over an ostensibly warm and happy major key landscape. Brahms used it very pointedly and a number of pieces and he also revived the shaken form at

a moment when it's it really seemed to have died out in musical history. There's this tremendous dark chicken at the end of his fourth symphony. And yes when I come to Bob Dylan at the end of the book I inserted a little more material in the essay to make the point that this this bass line in the song Simple Twist of Fate does point back centuries in musical history and there's a specific and rather eerie resemblance to Dido's Lament the great laments that Dido queen of Carthage sings at the end of Henry PERSONALES opera Dido and Aeneas. I have no idea whether Bob Dylan knows this music but the fact is you have another song here about feet and even about the idea of forgetting fate. And so this is Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing the end of Dido's

Lament. In. An all or. None. In. Well I have of course complete the collected

poems and also the library of America edition of Stephens. But the little paperback that I have read on my desk is the collection the palm at the end of the mind which actually I bought in Harvard bookstore and 1990 the first Steevens that I read and it had an enormous effect on me and he does remain my my favorite poet and a constant inspiration although of course I'm a model that I couldn't possibly hope to to match. But I pick up Wallace Stevens and I look at his language and words jump out at me in it and it seems to and live in my own vocabulary and sort of push me out of routines and cliches that I might have fallen into. So it really is my my verbal Bible in a way I think is it's very complicated. You know it's it's not a question of sort of a

intellectual understanding or an analytic understanding all of course that can be a very useful project to undertake. And I read analyses of music and I've sort of tried to do them myself on occasion although I lack the full academic training to do so. But I think I really mean something else when I say understanding in this context which is I think feeling at home in a piece of music knowing its contours well enough that you can almost walk through them blindfolded if that's not too convoluted a metaphor to apply to a a listening experience. But it's it's that sense that after a number of listenings and it may happen almost right away or it may take years

until you achieve that sense of security then then yes the music really does belong to you in some sense. And and that that you you feel it's it's difficult to put into words but I just sort of know what it what it is what it feels like from my point of view and my own history as a listener and and once I have achieved that sort of rougher sense of understanding it's it's always something that I that I try to guide others toward in my writing. And I often say you know if you don't understand a piece or an entire genre you know just simply listening again and then a third time and the fourth time is the way you may begin to change your perspective on it. And it may never happen you know this and there's there there are pieces there you know even

your entire genres that remain close to me or or to others. And that moment of transformation may never occur but it's an unpredictable process. And I always find it it really can happen out of the blue. You know once once you've made this sort of unknown number of attempts to really get to know a piece of music and I think it does also help to to to to read about a composer or an artist and to understand what is going on around them. You know where they come from biographically and socially and culturally and historically and you know although all that information may ultimately be on the outside of this sort of much more inward process that happens when we're listening deeply to music I think it can sort of push you over the edge in some mysterious way toward toward that deeper understanding.

Yeah that's an interesting question and it is sort of always oscillating for me and sort of experience my ups and downs with with composers over the years to two or to a degree that I'm actually I'm a little skeptical now I think you know both of my my enthusiasms and also of my you know apparent rejection of a particular kind of music because I know it can fluctuate and it's sort of like personal relationships. I feel my my my my sense of these composers as an artist is always changing. I think there was a time there was a time when when I I really don't mean to offend any brook Marians in the audience but when I was a kid I absolutely loved Bruckner.

I sort of loved the sound that Bruckner made the kind of you know sort of monumental aspect of it. The very first LP that I bought when I was 10 years old actually was his ninth symphony which should have been institutionalized or God therapy. For for listening to Bruckner at so young an age but and yeah I sort of remained a passion of mine through through my college years. And it's it's subsided now. It's not that I dislike Bruckner. I respect the composer but it doesn't seem to call out to me that I feel the sudden craving in the middle of the night to hear to hear Bruckner. But I know I mean 10 years from now I may be head over heels in love with Bruckner again. I don't know. It's it's again it's it's it's mysterious. And and you know there's lots of examples in pop music as well I just I've

never in my whole life have I really felt what so many other people feel for the Rolling Stones for example. But I think that may have been a symptom of just having come to to rock music much too late to to experience that sort of primal connection with the rolling stones stones that a lot of people felt at a at an earlier age. But you know like there's still time for me to wake Maybe I'll pick up the Keith Richards Richards memoir. That'll do it for me. Well I have something much better than a CD which is I have it on my web site. The rest is in dotcom I have hundreds of musical examples to go along with each chapter of the book. And so instead of you know you get 75 minutes on a CD if it were included in the book whereas you know here I have I don't how many hours I mean many many hours of music because of all those links to Web sites where you can hear a lot more of the music.

And I think this is actually a better way of doing it because I mean of course you need a viable internet connection. But it allows you to. It just gives me a lot more latitude in just presenting you know just so many different examples that people can can turn to and as they're reading and you know frankly the getting the rights for a CD to a lot of this music would be would be very difficult. It's a lot easier to obtain rights to have a streaming non downloadable audio sample on the internet for whatever reason it's easier. Oh well I have a couple of paragraphs in Sinatra and this book I wrote I wrote about him when he died. The New Yorker asked a number of critics and contributors to the magazine to offer their

thoughts about Sinatra. So I contributed a few of my own and added a little bit into it for this book. I love Sinatra I mean he's not someone I grew up with at all. I forget exactly exactly what age but you know sort of sometime you know well into my 20s that I started listening to him and it's sort of a my my appreciation for the power of his his voice and the meticulousness the nuance that he that he brought to the recitation of lyrics. It just grows and grows and it's this magnificent instrument in conjunction with the arrangements you know and he has such a fabulous taste in arrangers the people that he that he worked with Nelson Riddle and Gord Gordon Jenkins and those arrangements just sound better and better with the passage of time and just to throw in

a little bit more audio here. I'll play a little bit from the end of Angel Eyes and I mentioned Sinatra in this chapter on that in the book because I feel that Sinatra seemed to be drawn especially to songs that had these sliding chromatic elements to them. And so you do hear this in the in the bass and in Julys. In fact on. No. News no. Oh.

I can't fade it down we have to hear the rest. You hear me. So that's my comment on Sinatra. Sure yeah. I mean well first of all this this book is made up of longer pieces. And you very often when I decide to write a longer piece where I spend weeks or even months doing the research getting to know an artist to write a profile or studying up on a composer or the past it does really need to come from passion and enthusiasm and a sort of a deep seated positive feeling about the figure in question I just can't imagine spending that much time on someone I don't like.

And you know of course in my shorter pieces and in my columns for The New Yorker I I do sometimes go negative. You know when it's when I feel that it's deserved. So my favorite aspect of being a critic because I feel I only have so much time and only so much space and I might as well devote to to music that I admire as much as possible. And you know frankly if I criticize some well-known singer or or a pianist who usually has no effect whatsoever you know they just go on doing what they're doing. But if there's a lesser known a guy or a rising artist whom I do admire this is this is an area where where I can really have an impact and change something a little bit by drawing attention to him or her. So I do really enjoy that aspect of my job and in terms of right now what is sort of catching my

attention. It's hard to say I mean this there's this this is me there's a tremendous amount going on in the classical world right now is a lot of younger composers who are very very alive and energetic and really want to shake up the definition of what it means to be a composer and engaging with popular music or sort of a lot of music sort of outside of what composers ordinarily expected to to deal with is actually in New York this is really a thriving scene right now of much younger composers specifically in Brooklyn. So I've been following them a great deal. And I think you know the other very active and lively sort of subculture of classical music early music I think you know especially in baroque performance there is so much freedom

now so much more freedom than there was a few decades ago people are really rediscovering improvisation and taking the score not as an exact blueprint something to be reproduced note for note but as a really is a set of suggestions and filling in the rest with playing that comes directly from their own personalities and this is how music was was was played in the Baroque here. There was a great deal of spontaneity and improvisation so I find that very encouraging and it's just a joy to go to a concert where people are engaging with the music on that level. I've just been listening to a wonderful CD. I just put it on my blog yesterday recommending it very strongly called a flights of fantasy. Early Italian baroque chamber

music Monica Huggett is the leading the Irish baroque orchestra members of the Irish baroque orchestra and is just a joy from beginning. And there really is such freedom in the plan. We don't really know. This is how the music sounded back then but it sounds very alive right. Right in the present moment which which may maybe counts even more. Yes certainly I mean I mentioned Wilfrid Mellers and he's a strong example for me for many years this sort of historical criticsm mean George Bernard Shaw and Virgil Thomson Andrew Porter my august predecessor at the New Yorkers certainly an intimidating example for me because his knowledge is so vast. You know I also read pop music critics and I find their approach very refreshing and

provocative because you get a lot more social commentary political commentary in pop music criticism really addressing serious and pressing pressing issues that a lot of classical critics will shy away from politics race sexuality. And so I often look to them really as a as a signal to be more bold in policy as far as possible in my own writing and of course I have to say the extraordinary and provocative musicologist Richard Tarascon who is a scholar who has also great journalistic flair which is an unusual combination to find and and from from the time I first started out as a critic I was reading pieces that he wrote for The New Republic and The New York Times and they were a great inspiration to me with

a sense that you could take as sort of the journalistic piece and and really get in very deep in a given subject and and get into some very complex issues. But if you did it with sufficient I think verve and energy and style you can you can bring people all along. So that is what Richard Ruskin does know whether you agree with him or not. And often I don't. But but he is just tremendously exciting to engage with as a reader. Well in a way I wrote entire book on this question in the form of the rest the rest is noise where I tried to grapple with that issue and then transcended just by trying to point out to people the many many ways in which this music does did matter very directly in the culture and history of its time and also suggesting that the ways in which as a listener

you can you can really engage with it not just intellectually but emotionally but it remains sort of an unanswered question for me to a great extent. You have read I read sort of studies by neuroscientists and others who tend to determine Well you know is there a certain kind of music that sort of fundamentally is more agreeable to the human species and others you know are we sort of hard wired to prefer tonality to now. But you know the problem with that kind of study is that you know even if you're working with a group of infants or however they conduct these studies you're playing a Sternbergh to three month old babies. I'm not quite sure how it's done. You know there are already even at that age you know infants have already been probably surrounded by tonal music and it will already sound natural to them so I'm not entirely convinced even if the results do

seem to show some kind of natural preference to do tonality over 8 anality. You know I think you know every every kind of music is an acquired taste. I don't think we're born loving any kind of music and there's no music that's universally popular you know. I mean the most popular of popular artists are still a minority taste. I was reading a blogger who goes by the name of proper discord who pointed out that the top selling artist in America in a given week I forget who it was is Lady Gaga or someone the record had been bought by one in sixteen hundred Americans. So you know this was something that the average person on the street probably wasn't listening to. And yet it was whoever it was was the most popular artist in America at that moment.

So the point is I think you know in terms of you know falling in love with any given kind of music someone somewhere along the way has has guided us toward it and sort of brought us into it and you know the problem with 20th century classical music is that we've lacked so many of those guys. I mean if you compare the situation with modern art and there are studies that show that infants and sort of young people prefer representational art to abstract art is just it's just you know there's sort of naturally drawn to the basic represent representational version of making a picture. But then you know at some very early age as well they've been taken to a museum they see the Rothko's Picasso's and Kandinsky is on the on the wall and you know they may not fall in love with the painting right at that moment but you know a seed is planted and later in adulthood they come to appreciate that painting or at least respect it and view it as valid valid

artistic statement. And this just doesn't happen with with 20th century music for for so many people at that age or any age you know. And if you just consider all the work that went into the propagation of Modern Art you know the patrons the critics writing about it. You know the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago and so on and so forth you know years working actively to to persuade people of the value of this music. The same thing was not going on at symphony orchestras and opera houses almost everywhere for almost the entirety of the 20th century with some sporadic exceptions. But you know for the most part people weren't arguing for that music. So I feel that is really as close as possible to the root of it not a physiological explanation not it not a sort of a psychological one or even a cultural one but just the lack of of of good

propaganda frankly. And and I think it has begun to change you know. And I think I think there is more acceptance for even even the more adventurous varieties of 20th century music than there was you know even 20 years ago when I started out as a critic but ranting a little bit on this topic sorry. No I think you're right there is that sense that that is just a mysterious and opaque and impenetrable world for so many people and they they don't mind it. And you know if Mozart is playing in their dentist's waiting room they may find it perfectly agreeable but they're not going to make the effort to go to a concert they don't feel the need for it. And if they did try to go there they really might find the experience mystifying and satisfying on some level. And I think this is something that the classical world does need to address to some extent because I

feel that some of the more mainstream institutions have fallen into routines that have really barely changed for 100 years. These little rituals that have become attached to classical music which are pretty harmless in themselves but I think cumulatively give the appearance of an art that is frozen in time and this is why I love these you know this sort of baroque performances you know renaissance and baroque performances. You know another splendid example is the jaunty Savol that was joyous of all in his Hesperia and 21 ensemble playing the Chicana the Spanish Chicano that I demonstrated. And it's such a wonderfully alive and vibrant performance that just you know you don't want to think about is this classical music or is the popular music I mean who knows it is what it is. And so to start a little more of that vibrancy somehow would be would be very welcome in

I think symphony orchestra concerts in particular. And how exactly that would be done. Is this a difficult question. You know and there's all kinds of ways in which you could make very bad mistakes and and you know ruin the experience with sort of closing and condescending moves that you know aimed to attract younger audiences that you know aren't going to show up anyway and just sort of you know satisfies someone's sense of well we just need to try something. I mean it needs to be organic you know. And it needs to have artistic value. But I think it has to start with the performers. And I think in our conservatories teachers and their students really should be thinking on a deeper level about well why are we doing this. I mean we're not simply thinking of themselves simply as executors of this ancient tradition. But you know in a contemporary context you know why are we

playing this music and if people aren't getting it you know how how how can we bring it to life for them. And I think that's they have to provide the answer and critics and everyone else can sort of talk and talk and talk but you know the ultimately the answer has to come from them. Let me get inside the mind of Mozart for a second. No I mean it's fascinating or Wagner. You know I think it's even more fascinating is to kind of know what would Wagner What would he be doing and you know where should we go hide and duck. Well he perpetrates whatever it is that he's about to do. I mean but you know then I mean when you when you say the name Wagner I got what I mean I think it was just the the the the audacity the the wild ambition that Wagner showed. And that's not even a question of words. You know what genre what medium are you going to apply yourself to. But but simply that that mad sense of daring and

this urge to do something that everyone at the time declared to be impossible you know and he went ahead and did it anyway and Mozart frankly did the same thing with Don Giovanni which was a daring and dangerous piece in a lot of ways. And and he was combining genres in his day and sort of sort of blending the boundary between what was a you know an aria and what was instrumental solo. It was a symphony. What was an opera. So I think that kind of non sort of you know impolite sort of. Sort of you know against the grain kind of thinking is is is really what we need. So I would like to see more more mad ambition in today's younger composers. I think it might be all that we have time for but thank you all so much and I'd be happy to

sign books. Of course