I haven't been reading The New Yorker in a while. So this is sort of news to me but not exactly news. I'd read Alex Ross and I enjoyed The Rest is Noise. Recognizing that styles outside the usual canonized placeholders in concert music exist doesn't make Ross a revisionist. If anything it's a sign of his being a candidate for "the" classical music critic of the current American age that he could write about Sibelius and recognize that Bjork also exists. And since I like Frank Martin's Mass for double chorus I hardly had a problem with Ross pointing out that the work exists. There was a stretch in my life where I was soaking up Frank Martin's Mass and reading Emil Brunner, which could be jokingly presented as a dual pinnacle of Swiss Reformed Christian piety in the first half of the 20th century.
Music critics inevitably soapbox and Ross had his favorites. I still find Wagner's music annoying at best and the man himself to have been repellant. But Wagner's influence is also inescapable and the music has stuck around in a way that has allowed for divergent readings and receptions of the work. Philip Ewell somewhat telegraphed this point in his book, but a big difference between a Richard Wagner and a Heinrich Schenker is simply in the fact that Wagner wrote music that can be "read" at a number of levels while Schenker promulgated a theory that dictated the rules of its reception as a matter of principle. Scott Joplin could draw upon Wagnerian precedent when composing Treemonisha in a way he couldn't have if he were to have attempted to write a piano concerto based on some kind of Schenkerian ur-line.
So Ross has had his ideas and interests but I don't think that automatically makes or breaks a critic. Terry Teachout wrote a decade or two ago that a great critic can be more useful in being completely wrong than average or even good critics are in always being right (whatever that may mean).
But ... most influential classical music critic of the last thirty years? I mean ... influencing who? Subscribers to The New Yorker? No disrespect meant to Alex Ross at all but I realize as I'm typing this post that I read a whole lot more Kyle Gann in the last twenty years than I read Alex Ross. Maybe for consumers of classical music Alex Ross was the bigger name but among composers (vocational or avocational) I wonder if the more widely-read classical music writer was Gann.
You know ... Kyle Gann as composer and music critic could be interpreted as a throwback to the 19th century paradigm in which Hector Berlioz wrote music and music criticism. The demise of the classical music critic as perceived by cultural gatekeepers and metacultural pundits in the late 20th and early 21st centuries might be explicable in light of a separation of tasks--if criticism is professionally separated from the actual production of music we won't get Berlioz or Wagner figures. I mean I find Wagner repellant at many levels but he wrote music and he wrote about music.
Which, as I'm idling about in a blog post on the eve of the Fourth of July, it gets me thinking about how I've read Ethan Iverson off and on over the last fifteen years. I come back to people who write criticism and music side by side more consistently than I come back to critics who are "just" critics. When Iverson wrote about having issues with Nikolai Kapustin I was able to intuit that the thing about Kapustin's piano sonatas that Iverson seemed to find wanting is the sense that Kapustin's piano sonatas are big on thematic presentation but fall short in the realm of thematic differentiation. I was later able to discuss Iverson's Clarinet Sonata and show that his own themes are clearly presented and clearly differentiated within his forms.
And, of course, regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet know I have had a lot of fun interacting with the blogging of Ethan Hein. So, I think it's a day to say that I did benefit from reading Alex Ross off and on over the years but that, in a way, maybe in a lot of ways, Ross' position at The New Yorker was symbolic for arbiters of what should or shouldn't count as "culture". That there are great rivers of populist and anti-populist sentiment among composers (Strauss and Mahler) is an interesting grand thesis ... but even in an allegedly post-Lyotardian era skeptical of grand narratives there's this penchant among culture writers for precisely the grand narratives that "we" are supposedly so skeptical about (a point I must credit to Andrew Bowie, who finds the whole Lyotardian claim that grand narratives are "over" to be absurd because Lyotard's own grand narrative is just that).
But if we recalibrate our perspective a bit and look back on the ways that jazz players mastered light classical music or how ragtime players would rag the classics during the early 20th century when composers would make a show of writing rags, it might be useful to consider that reconsidering the intra-critical super-myths established by the gatekeepers and scholars of the 20th century is just where we are at. It's not just in classical music that the hoary received narratives of yore have come in for scrutiny and grilling, similarly revisionist work has been getting done in jazz and blues (I just finished two pretty good books by Adam Gussow on blues). To the extent that Ross has played a part in recognizing that classical music in the last century has not only never existed in a vacuum but can be understood as co-existing alongside a panoply of styles then Alex Ross' contribution was to, well, this seems cheeky, the contribution was to simply recontextualize the observations of Leonard Meyer into the 21st century. Democracy doesn't require that everyone like the same thing but that everyone is free to honestly like whatever they like, to paraphrase Meyer.
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