Top 10 Alex Ross Quotes (2024 Update)

Alex Ross Quote: “The difficult thing about music writing, in the end, is not to describe a sound but to describe a human being.”

1. “The difficult thing about music writing, in the end, is not to describe a sound but to describe a human being.”

Alex Ross Quote: “The principal irony of the history of recording is that Edison did not make the phonograph with music in mind. Rather, he conceived of his cylinder as a business gadget, one that would supersede the costly, imperfect practice of stenography and have the added virtue of preserving in perpetuity the voices of the deceased.”

2. “The principal irony of the history of recording is that Edison did not make the phonograph with music in mind. Rather, he conceived of his cylinder as a business gadget, one that would supersede the costly, imperfect practice of stenography and have the added virtue of preserving in perpetuity the voices of the deceased.”

Alex Ross Quote: “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in one of its saner moments, defined music as “a specific variant of the sound made by people.”

3. “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in one of its saner moments, defined music as “a specific variant of the sound made by people.”

Alex Ross Quote: “For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority.”

4. “For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority.”

Alex Ross Quote: “Every art fights the noose of verbal description.”

5. “Every art fights the noose of verbal description.”

Alex Ross Quote: “As does Strindberg: ‘Life makes everything ugly.”

6. “As does Strindberg: ‘Life makes everything ugly.”

Alex Ross Quote: “There is much to be said for the artwork that answers horror by rejecting or transcending it.”

7. “There is much to be said for the artwork that answers horror by rejecting or transcending it.”

Alex Ross Quote: “The best kind of classical performance is not a retreat into the past but an intensification of the present. The mistake that apostles of the classical have always made is to have joined their love of the past to a dislike of the present. The music has other ideas: it hates the past and wants to escape.”

8. “The best kind of classical performance is not a retreat into the past but an intensification of the present. The mistake that apostles of the classical have always made is to have joined their love of the past to a dislike of the present. The music has other ideas: it hates the past and wants to escape.”

Alex Ross Quote: “Don’t make it new; make it whole.”

9. “Don’t make it new; make it whole.”

Alex Ross Quote: “Finally, three smashing chords to finish, obviously intended to set off a roar of applause. I start to clap, but the man with the score glares again. One does not applaud in the midst of greatly great great music, even if the composer wants one to! Coughing, squirming, whispering, the crowd suppresses its urge to express pleasure. It’s like mass anal retention.”

10. “Finally, three smashing chords to finish, obviously intended to set off a roar of applause. I start to clap, but the man with the score glares again. One does not applaud in the midst of greatly great great music, even if the composer wants one to! Coughing, squirming, whispering, the crowd suppresses its urge to express pleasure. It’s like mass anal retention.”

Alex Ross Quote: “The fetishizing of the past had a degrading effect on composers’ morale. They started to doubt their ability to please this implacable audience, which seemed prepared to reject their wares no matter what style they wrote in. If no one cares, composers reasoned, we might as well write for one another. This was the attitude that led to the intransigent, sometimes antisocial mentality of the twentieth-century avant-garde.”

11. “The fetishizing of the past had a degrading effect on composers’ morale. They started to doubt their ability to please this implacable audience, which seemed prepared to reject their wares no matter what style they wrote in. If no one cares, composers reasoned, we might as well write for one another. This was the attitude that led to the intransigent, sometimes antisocial mentality of the twentieth-century avant-garde.”

Alex Ross Quote: “The composer came to represent the cultural-political unconscious of modernity – an aesthetic war zone in which the Western world struggled with its raging contradictions, its longings for creation and destruction, its inclinations toward beauty and violence. Wagner was arguably the presiding spirit of the bourgeois century that achieved its highest splendor around 1900 and then went to its doom.”

12. “The composer came to represent the cultural-political unconscious of modernity – an aesthetic war zone in which the Western world struggled with its raging contradictions, its longings for creation and destruction, its inclinations toward beauty and violence. Wagner was arguably the presiding spirit of the bourgeois century that achieved its highest splendor around 1900 and then went to its doom.”

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