Alex Ross is arguably the most celebrated active, American music critic and until this show, completely unknown to me. I feel like I "should" read The New Yorker and am sure I can pick it up at the local library, but just never fell into it. In fact, like many people I consume the vast majority of media content online because our house is not really set up for quiet reading and is instead organized around four teenage boys. The most action is in the computer room where they do homework, surf the net and catch up with friends online.
Ross only listened to classical music until he was 20, but now his interests now go in all directions. He's written a few best selling books on music, the latest of which is "Listen To This" a wide ranging work on music across the centuries, and that does a few deep dives into interesting topics. It's an edited compilation of his essays over the past 12 years, and looks for a common thread between musical genres, styles and time. For example, he and Tom Ashbrook discussed the "descending bass line" found consistently in music through the centuries. His examples focus on the chromatic scale, which is simply all the individual half note intervals without the normal whole step found in other scales. In simple terms, a chromatic scale can be played on a piano by pressing every black or white key in order, so A, A#, B, C, C# etc. A famous rock era descending bass line is on Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused" in which Jimmie Page plays it over and over again. Similar lines were heard in a delta blues song and operatic aria. Ross's hypothesis is that this line is intimately connected to "sad" human exhalation such as exclaiming "Awww" to convey a sense of dismay. Authors take advantage of this human experience and intrinsically convey a well known emotion.
He thinks Bjork is the most gifted musician of our time, but the show didn't dig into this, and I'm fascinated enough to do some further digging. I have a few Bjork CDs, but didn't find them gripping at first listen, so will try again. He is most definitely not a music snob and had kind things to say about a wide variety of genres like death metal, and focused on a couple of bands who play not only good music, but are clearly gifted musicians who know exactly what they're doing with music theory. Radiohead, for example, employs guitar chord changes and formations that are often highly unusual, and must certainly not self-taught. In fact, he said that Radiohead was spurred on by a high school teacher who pushed the then boys in new directions.
I'm absolutely going to check out the book from the library, and get my 13-year old son to try and listen to the podcast. He's the closest thing to a music enthusiast among the siblings and is intellectual in a way that would find resonance with Ross's points. If he enjoys the podcast then maybe we can read the book together and give hims some exposure to a world of music. I thoroughly enjoy music and have a huge range of content, but excluding classical. Ross made a great point on this, and claims he "hates classical music." Not the music itself, but the term, which labels the music as "old" and makes it unapproachable by the vast majority of people, particularly younger ones. I think it's time that I add a few CDs to my collection and enjoy my forties in a quieter manner.
