I didn’t know how much I needed this book until I began reading it. I realise now that there was an enormous gap in my musical knowledge which Alex Ross’ brilliant study has helped to fill. By the end, he won me over to his central argument that “at the beginning of the 21st century, the impulse to pit classical music against pop culture no longer makes intellectual or emotional sense“.
One of the main strengths of the book is that Ross does not write from an elitist perspective. He is all too aware of the negative popular perception of classical music which means that it is “widely mocked as a stuck-up, sissified, intrinsically un-American pursuit“. At the same time he doesn’t argue that self appointed musical experts are always right : “Mainstream audiences may lag behind the intellectual classes in appreciating the more adventurous composers, but sometimes they are quicker to perceive the value of music that the politicians of style fail to comprehend“. It is this open minded, even handed approach that makes his description of  100 years of ‘difficult music’ so illuminating. Continue reading
