Alex Ross > Quotes

“Don't make it new; make it whole.”
― Alex Ross

“One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood County Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twientieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. Decades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. “Lies, Frau Marta, lies!” Schoenberg was yelling. “You have to know, I never had syphilis!”
― Alex Ross

“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, Listen to This

“It is one thing to get all the notes right; any number of unsocialized conservatory prodigies can do that. It is another thing to play the thoughts within the notes, the light around them, the darkness behind them, the silence at the end of the phrase. That is what inspires awe.”
― Alex Ross

“In the story of Wagner and Wagnerism, we see both the highest and the lowest impulses of humanity entangled. It is the triumph of art over reality and the triumph of reality over art; it is a tragedy of flaws set so deep that after two centuries they still infuriate us as if the man were in the room. To blame Wagner for the horrors committed in his wake is an inadequate response to historical complexity: it lets the rest of civilization off the hook. At the same time, to exonerate him is to ignore his insidious ramifications. It is no longer possible to idealize Wagner: the ugliness of his racism means that posterity's picture of him will always be cracked down the middle. In the end, the lack of a tidy moral resolution should make us more honest about the role that art plays in the world. In Wagner's vicinity, the fantasy of artistic autonomy falls to pieces and the cult of genius comes undone. Amid the wreckage, the artist is liberated from the mystification of "great art”. He becomes something more unstable, fragile, and mutable. Incomplete in himself, he requires the most active and critical kind of listening.

So it goes with all art that endures: it is never a matter of beauty proving eternal. When we look at Wagner, we are gazing into a magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species. What we hate in it, we hate in ourselves; what we love in it, we love in ourselves also. In the distance we may catch glimpses of some higher realm, some glimmering temple, some ecstasy of knowledge and compassion. But it is only a shadow on the wall, an echo from the pit. The vision fades, the curtain falls, and we shuffle back in silence to the world as it is.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“And suddenly…there was a wind. No, not a wind. A blur of motion… Bending the steel of their weapons and changing the very course of the might river below. Even before the bystanders freed themselves from the cable car, they know. We all did. We knew… and remembered.”
― Alex Ross, Kingdom Come

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

“In a way, Schoenberg's journey resembles that of Theodor Herzi, the progenitor of political Zionism, whose early attacks on self-satisfied assimilated urban Jews could be mistaken for anti-Semitic diatribes. The scholar Alexander Ringer has argued that Schoenberg's atonality may have been an oblique affirmation of his Jewishness. In this reading, it is a kind of musical Zion, a promised land in whose dusty desert climate the Jewish composer could escape the ill-concealed hatred of bourgeois Europe.

Schoenberg would prove uncannily alert to the murderousness of Nazi anti-Semitism. In 1934, he predicted that Hitler was planning "no more and no less than the extermination of all Jews!" Such thoughts were presumably not on his mind circa 1907 and 1908, yet to be Jewish in Vienna was to live under a vague but growing threat. Anti-semitism was shifting from a religious to a racial basis, meaning that a conversion to Catholicism or Protestantism no longer sufficed to solve one's Jewish problem. Rights and freedoms were being picked off one by one. Jews were expelled from student societies, boycotts instituted. There were beatings in the streets. Rabble-rousers spouted messages of hate. Hitler himself was somewhere in the background, trying to make his way as an artist, building a cathedral of resentment in his mind. As the historian Steven Beller writes, Jews were "at the center of culture but the edge of society." Mahler ruled musical Vienna; at the same time, Jewish men never felt safe walking the streets at night.

All told, a Freudian host of urges, emotions, and ideas circled Schoenberg as he put his fateful chords on paper. He endured violent disorder in his private life; he felt ostracized by a museum-like concert culture; he experienced the alienation of being a Jew in Vienna; he sensed a historical tendency from consonance to dissonance; he felt disgust for a tonal system grown sickly. But the very multiplicity of possible explanations points up something that cannot be explained. There was no "necessity" driving atonality; no irreversible current of history made it happen. It was one man's leap into the unknown. It became a movement when two equally gifted composers jumped in behind him.”
― alex ross, THE REST IS NOISE : ? L'?COUTE DU XXE SI?CLE by ALEX ROSS

“One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twentieth century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of the émigré novelist lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting in German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. Decades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. 'Lies, Frau Marta, lies!' Schoenberg was yelling. 'You have to know, "I never had syphilis!”
― Alex Ross

“O melhor tipo de interpretação clássica não é um recuo para o passado, mas uma intensificação do presente”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This

“Works of post-Wagnerian modernism, Ulysses included, superimpose myth and modernity in a way that promises a comprehensive revelation of the world, both its variegated surfaces and its primordial roots. In The Waste Land, such correspondences tend to break down. Archetypes float up from the depths of the past, but they ultimately find little lasting resonance in contemporary lives. Instead, they provide a reassuring clutter of allusions for the stranded intellect: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." In that sense, Eliot's poem is, more than Ulysses, an irrevocably anti-Romantic, anti-Wagnerian work.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“Histories of music since 1900 often take the form of a teleological tale, a goal-obsessed narrative full of great leaps forward and heroic battles with the philistine bourgeoisie. When the concept of progress assumes exaggerated importance, many works are struck from the historical record on the grounds that they have nothing new to say.”
― Alex Ross

“Yet Götterdämmerung is no apocalypse: it envisions a transfer of power, from gods to people. It is also the redress of a wrong, restoring the Ring from the illusory heights to the truthful depths. Wotan, very unlike Hitler, has repented of his megalomania: "I longed in my heart for power ... I acted unfairly… I did not return the ring to the Rhine... The curse that I fed will not flee from me now." The conductor Christoph von Dohnányi, whose father, Hans, was part of the anti-Nazi resistance, once told me: "When I really think about Wagner, I don't discover anything that had to lead to Hitler. And what happens here"—we were looking at the score of Walkure, at Wotan's cries of shame—"is not something that any fascist could have written. Because it is not simplifying. It is a 'giving up' thing. Wagner abused power but hated the state." "Götterdämmerung" is the wrong word for the scenes that unfolded in Berlin during the war's last days: the double suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun, the suicides of Josef and Magda Goebbels, the murder of the Goebbels children, the killing of Hitler's dogs.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music