No, the Other Alex Ross
Poor Alex Ross. No matter that he's a high-minded music critic, no matter that during his esteemed career he's been a columnist for the New York Times and (currently) the New Yorker, no matter that he's an anti-elitist classical music lover...he's still the second-most famous fella to go by those two four-letter names. Yep, the dude who turns up first in Google and Wikipedia is the other Alex Ross, the comic book guy. It's a shame, because music book guy Alex Ross, who was in town this weekend for the EMP Pop Conference and an "iPod lecture" at On the Boards, well deserves to be the preeminent Alex Ross in all of Alex Ross-dom.
Being a big fan of his New Yorker pieces, Seattlest attended the OtB talk on Friday night. As it turned out, the term "iPod lecture" was a misnomer. Yes, Ross peppered his talk with music clips---a lot of music, as evidenced by the huge list of tracks on his blog---but if anything it was an iTunes lecture. Not to be niggling, but for a man who writes as precisely as Ross, who manages to be both elegant in tone and passionate about his subjects (be they nouveau Finnish opera composers or Radiohead...but we repeat ourselves), we would think he'd use the proper term for exactly which medium he was employing. Whatevs.
The talk dealt with 20th century composers, a vast topic on which he's also writing a book, due sometime in 2007. What a coincidence! In his lecture Ross walked the audience through the entire frigging century: the early ventures into atonality and dissonance; the vast influence of Schoenberg, Stravinksy, and Strauss; the lead-up to WWII and its simultaneous, strikingly similar effect on music in America, Germany, and the USSR; the incorporation of ethnic folk music/jazz/industrial sounds into the classical music canon; the appearance of the twelve-tone technique and the disappearance of all conventional notions of pitch and rhythm; the West Coast school of classical music; and finally some of the modern composers we were more familiar with (or at least had heard of), like John Cage and Phillip Glass.
That's a lot of ground to cover, and Ross should be commending for attempting to address it all, and for doing so in such an entertaining way. He would talk about a particular piece before playing a clip, during which he would nod his head along with the music, accent notes with a pointed finger, or translate the operatic German for the audience. He had all kinds of great anecdotes and factoids, and one thing is incredibly clear: The man knows his music. Ross has an amazingly trained ear for detail, hearing aspects of works---the specific thematic elements employed---that we would have never noticed. Primarily because we're cultural heathens.
However, there was one major flaw to his presentation, and it's a big 'un: It was loooooooooooong. Ross stated that the intent was get through the entire century in an hour, while the program stated the talk would run for 90 minutes (as Ross' post-mortum blog also claims). But how long was the lecture? 135 minutes. That's right, 2 hours and 15 minutes of classical music talk. While it was interesting, the crowd as a whole started to get antsy around the 100-minute mark. That's also when people started to leave. We can understand going over by 10 or even 15 minutes. But 45 minutes? That's ridiculous. Look Alex, we know that you love all your little stories and your music clips, but at that length, something's gotta give. Wrap it up, buddy, you can't cover a book it's taken years to write in a 90-minute lecture.
