December 19, 2004

Andrew Ross and Bach

I was excited to learn that Andrew Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker Magazine has a blog:The Rest Is Noise. I developed a special interest in Ross after using of a quote by Ross in my essay The Cosmic Bach?:

    "When people talk about Bach, they often sound like Erich von Stroheim in 'Sunset Boulevard,' as he intones, in tribute to Norma Desmond, 'She vas de greatest of dem all.' .... One can end up saying, in a distinctly off-putting way, not only that Bach...is the greatest but also that everything else is worthless."

Some other references to J. S. Bach in Ross' blog are:

  • The Rest Is Noise: Escaping the Museum:

      • Were Baroque listeners uncultured idiots? Or did they have a healthier attitude toward music’s place in society? At about the time audiences began treating composers like gods, it would seem, the truly godlike composers began to disappear.

  • Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Abba to Zywny:

      • When it comes to the central figures of musical history, the Grove gets the proportions right. Beethoven is still champion after all these years, with forty-two double-columned pages of biography and analysis. As in the previous edition, Beethoven’s works are written up flawlessly by Joseph Kerman, the dean of American musicologists. J. S. Bach gets thirty-six pages, Schubert thirty-four, Haydn thirty-three, Handel thirty-one, Mozart twenty-nine.
    Posted by rdhyee at December 19, 2004 05:48 PM