13 Quotes by Alex Ross

Don't make it new; make it whole.

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

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.

As does Strindberg: ‘Life makes everything ugly.

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

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

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.

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.

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.