Alex Ross (music critic)
Alex Ross (born 1968) is an American music critic. He has been on the staff of The New Yorker magazine since 1996 and published a critically acclaimed book on 20th-century classical music in 2007, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
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[edit] Biography
Ross is a 1986 graduate of St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. and a 1990 graduate of Harvard University, where he studied under composer Peter Lieberson and was a DJ on the classical and underground rock departments of the college radio station, WHRB. He earned a Harvard A.B. in English summa cum laude for a thesis on James Joyce.
From 1992 to 1996 Ross was a music critic at the New York Times. He also wrote for The New Republic, Slate, the London Review of Books, Lingua Franca, Fanfare and Feed. He first contributed to The New Yorker in 1993 and became a staff writer in 1996.
His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a cultural history of music since 1900, was released in the U.S. in 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the U.K. in 2008. The book received widespread critical praise in the U.S., garnering a National Book Critics Circle Award, a spot on the New York Times list of the ten best books of 2007, and a finalist citation for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. The book was also shortlisted for the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.[1]
His second book, Listen to This, was released in the U.S. in September 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was published in the U.K. in November 2010.
He has received a MacArthur Fellowship,[2] three ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for music writing, and a Holtzbrinck fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2011 he will receive the Belmont Prize for Contemporary Music at the pèlerinages Art Festival in Weimar.
Alex Ross married[3] director Jonathan Lisecki in Canada in 2005.[4]
[edit] Bibliography
Incomplete - to be updated
[edit] Books
- Ross, Alex (2007). The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-24939-7.
- Ross, Alex (2010). Listen to This. Fourth Estate. ISBN 978-0-00-731906-0.
[edit] Articles
- Ross, Alex (15 March 2010). "Critic's Notebook: Baritone Poem". The New Yorker 86 (4): 15. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2010/03/15/100315gonb_GOAT_notebook_ross. Retrieved 15 January 2011. (Subject: Baritone Gerald Finley)
- Ross, Alex (29 March 2010). "Musical Events: House of Style". The New Yorker 86 (6): 90–92. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2010/03/29/100329crmu_music_ross. Retrieved 28 March 2011. (Subject: Peter Gelb and the 2010-11 season at the Metropolitan Opera)
[edit] References
- ^ "BBC Four - 2008 Shortlist for Samuel Johnson Prize". http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/books/features/samueljohnson/shortlist.shtml.
- ^ David Kelly (23 September 2008). "MacArthurs, Parked". Papercuts (New York Times blog). http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/macarthurs-parked/. Retrieved 24 March 2009.
- ^ The Canadian Civil Marriage Act 2005 permits same-sex marriage.
- ^ Bonanos, Christopher (November 7, 2007). "You'll happily be taken along for the ride". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/07/usa.classicalmusic. Retrieved 2008-08-12
[edit] External links
- The Rest is Noise. Articles, a blog, and a book.
- "The Best Listener in America" - Alex Ross profile in The New York Observer, 9 October 2007
- The 'Mash of Myriad Sounds' Michael Kimmelman review of The Rest Is Noise from The New York Review of Books
- The Big Rewind: How The Rest Is Noise changes our understanding of 20th-century music, by Jan Swafford
- From classics to pop, The Economist, October 28th, 2010
| Preceded by Paul Griffiths |
Music Critic of The New Yorker 1996- |
Succeeded by incumbent |
