From classics to pop

Writing about music isnt especially difficult, avers Alex Ross,The New Yorkers music critic,at the start of his new collection of essays.

Writing about music isnt especially difficult, avers Alex Ross,The New Yorkers music critic,at the start of his new collection of essays. That sounds too modest. Mr Rosss history of music in the 20th century,The Rest is Noise,published in 2007,is such a pleasure to read that it must have been hell to write. The same goes for these pieces,which are mostly reworked articles from his day job,ranging from Björk to Brahms,and Radiohead to Verdi.

Mr Ross is surely correct,though,that every art form fights the noose of verbal description; there is nothing uniquely ineffable about music. He is on a mission to demystify it,especially the classical kind,which is what he mainly writes about. Classical music now accounts for about 2 per cent of recorded-music sales in America,down from 20 per cent in the early 1960s,a decline that Mr Ross attributes partly to its necrophiliac fixation on composers who,as an old joke has it,are long decomposed.

Another pet project of the authors is making excursions across the border between popular and classical genres,trying to lure the denizens of one side to the territory of the other. He reports that he listened to nothing but classical music until he was 20,at the end of the 1980s. Then,at college,he sold his recordings of Arnold Baxs symphonies to buy Pere Ubu and Sonic Youth,and hung out at punk clubs in Berkeley. The result is a critic with an unusually wide frame of reference. Another rare characteristic is his sunny outlook: this is a critic who rarely criticises.

Coming to pop relatively late,Mr Ross tends,he admits,to invest it with more adult feeling; he launches an impressive sally against the idea that classical music is intrinsically grown-up and pop isnt. With an eye for telling detail,he notes that the players of the Berlin Philharmonic are,on average,a generation younger than the members of the Rolling Stones. Still,while the professional performers of classical music are getting steadily younger,the audience for classical music remains older though not richer than the audience for any other art form,at least in America.

Not,perhaps,in China,though,which is the subject of an intriguing musical travelogue. The Sichuan Conservatory in Chengdu is said to have more than 10,000 students the Juilliard in New York has 800,and the low end of estimates of the numbers of Chinese children learning piano is

30 million. Although Western classical music has boomed in China,Mr Ross reckons that orchestral playing in Beijing is not up to the standards of London,Paris or New York. The classical tradition is not only relatively new in China,and subject to sporadic political interference,but,he reckons,it lacks the collaborative mentality required for great orchestras.

Asians are to be seen on classical podiums across America,but,as the author notes in a profile of Marian Anderson,a contralto whom Arturo Toscanini called a once-in-a-century voice,blacks make up just 2 per cent of orchestral players. In 1939 Anderson was banned from performing in the largest concert hall in Washington,DC,by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Refused a room at a hotel in Princeton,she spent the night at Albert Einsteins house instead. Anderson persisted,but many black would-be classical musicians have turned to other forms of music because of racial discrimination: Miles Davis and Nina Simone are two examples. Mr Ross is one of few critics who could have analysed their work whichever paths they had chosen to follow.

The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010