I was excited to learn that Andrew Ross, the classical
music critic for The New Yorker Magazine
has a blog:The Rest
Is Noise. I developed a special interest in Ross after using of a quote by
Ross in my essay The
Cosmic Bach?:
- “When people talk about Bach, they often sound
like Erich von Stroheim in ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ as he intones, in
tribute to Norma Desmond, ‘She vas de greatest of dem all.’ …. One
can end up saying, in a distinctly off-putting way, not only that
Bach…is the greatest but also that everything else is worthless.”
Some other references to J. S. Bach in Ross’ blog are:
- Were Baroque listeners uncultured
idiots? Or did they have a healthier attitude toward music’s place in
society? At about the time audiences began treating composers like
gods, it would seem, the truly godlike composers began to disappear.
- When it comes to the central figures
of musical history, the Grove gets the proportions right. Beethoven is
still champion after all these years, with forty-two double-columned
pages of biography and analysis. As in the previous edition,
Beethoven’s works are written up flawlessly by Joseph Kerman, the dean
of American musicologists. J. S. Bach gets thirty-six pages, Schubert
thirty-four, Haydn thirty-three, Handel thirty-one, Mozart
twenty-nine.