Listen to This

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Music

Listen to This Details

Review “An indispensable, erudite collection.” ―Entertainment Weekly“Ross veers effortlessly from Mozart to Radiohead, and from Kurt Cobain to Brahms, bringing a pop fan's enthusiasm to the composers and treating the rock stars seriously as musicians.…A joy for a pop fan or a classical aficionado.” ―The New York Times Book Review“So graceful, so pithy, so thoughtful, and full of insight…one cannot believe that anyone who loves music would not love Listen to This.” ―The Christian Science Monitor“No matter how complex his thinking, Ross renders it in lucid, approachable language: as you read Ross's writing, you hear him talking to you.” ―Fred Cohn, Opera News“[Ross] reminds me of my other favorite music critic, Bernard Shaw.” ―Roger Ebert“Even at his most cerebral, Ross deftly draws in the ears of the seasoned and the uninitiated alike, demystifying the traditions of music while celebrating its ability to transform. . . Listen to This is undeniably essential.” ―Time Out (Chicago)“A collection of supremely eloquent essays, addressing a range of subjects from Bach to Björk.” ―The Boston Globe“Every page of this collection is rich with vivid analysis and evocative vigor...Listen to This deserves to stand next to the best-written modern books on music: the collected works of Whitney Balliett, say, and Ross' own recent history of 20th century sounds, The Rest Is Noise.” ―Tom Nolan, San Francisco Chronicle“Vibrant . . . A celebration of what it means to be alive in a world of great music.” ―Kirkus Reviews“In this brilliant collection, music critic Ross utilizes a wide musical scale--classical music in China; opera as popular art; sketches of Schubert, Bjork, Kiki and Herb--as a way of understanding the world. Featuring mostly revised essays published in the span of his 12-year career at the New Yorker, Ross offers timeless portraits that probe the ways that the powerful personalities of composers and musicians stamp an inherently abstract medium so that certain notes, songs, or choruses become instantly recognizable as the work of a certain artist. The virtuoso performance comes in the one previously unpublished essay, Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues, where Ross isolates three different bass lines as they wind through music history from the 16th-century chacona, a dance that promised the upending of the social order, through the laments of Bach, opera, and finally the blues. Ross nimbly finds the common ground on which 16th-century Spanish musicians, Bach, players from Ellington' s 1940 band and Led Zeppelin' s bassist John Paul Jones can stand, at least momentarily.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review) Read more About the Author ALEX ROSS has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award. Read more

Reviews

Had I not read the author's "The Rest is Noise" before reading "Listen to This", I would probably have enjoyed "Listen" more and might given it four stars. But that's the problem with being the pretty good younger sibling of a dazzling first child: nobody judges you on your own merits. "Noise" is one of the few books that have really taught me a lot: it's also a beautifully written book, pulling the reader along without the effort usually entailed in learning a lot."Listen" isn't in the same league as "Noise". Now, before going further, I should say that it clearly was not intended to be. "Listen to This", as Ross says, "combines various New Yorker articles, several of them substantially revised, with one long piece written for the occasion." The articles cover a wide range of musical topics, ranging in time from the Renaissance to yesterday, and in genre from the most popular to the most intellectualized. There is little structural linkage between one article and another, and it probably doesn't matter much if you read them out of order.The articles are well worth reading, though some (not surprisingly) are on topics of more interest to this reader than others. But that is good feature in this sort of miscellany. Reading something about a musician or composer in whom the reader has absolutely no interest could (and in this case did) spark some interest, leading to a listen to one of the works in question, and to a broadening of horizons. The first essay is of particular interest. It traces a pair of musical figures through the whole history of "western" music. It is also demanding, whereas some of the other essays are the non-fiction equivalent of easy listening.As usual, Ross's writing is a delight; clear, supple, and unusually successful in conveying something about music (so much writing about music brings to mind the quote about dancing about architecture) Also, thanks and cheers for his website [...] where you can listen to the music he discusses in the book.In sum, this is a pleasant and perceptive collection of essays by a music critic who is always worth reading. Let's hope that something more major is waiting in the wings.

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