New Music And Writers On Music

Several days after posting our mini-rant, "Manifesto (A Mini-Rant)", trashing the "music" of composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley (and, glancingly, the non-opera music of Philip Glass along with works by Cage, Babbitt, and Stockhausen which "music" we even more glancingly trashed) the several-times edited concluding sentence of which read:

They're [i.e., the "minimalist" works of Reich and Riley are] tedious, mind-numbing bores — clear reactionary responses to the complicated (posing as complex) musical gibberish produced by Modernist-era, avant-garde charlatans such as Cage, Babbitt, and Stockhausen and their ilk, and, pace Alex Ross and other well-informed appreciators of the 20th-century's musical avant-garde, taking them seriously as music is something that ought not to be encouraged,

it occurred to us that perhaps it was high time we read rather than virtually skip over completely, as we did the first time round, the "Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists" chapter of Alex Ross's, The Rest Is Noise, to see what he had to say there.

And so we finally did, and were struck afresh by Ross's almost preternatural skill in non-judgmentally (as in, no ax to grind) describing music and its context in words in such a way that one feels it an almost imperative to actually hear that which he's describing. It's not for nothing that Ross and The Rest Is Noise received the almost universal accolades of the critical press, and were the recipients of several prestigious awards (that the Pulitzer was not among them will forever be a blot against its awards committee).

Did what Ross have to say in this chapter (or anywhere else in the book, for that matter) change our mind about the "music" of Reich and Riley (and the non-opera music of Glass)? It did not. But that's quite beside the point, isn't it, the point being that had we not already done so we would have felt all but compelled to hear this "music" never mind how tedious and mind-numbing the reality of it proved to be for us. Would that more writers on music possessed and displayed in their writings Ross's extraordinary skill, for if they did it seems to us that much so-called New Music that truly deserves multiple hearings would not languish for want of it.