At least according to the MacArthur Foundation, who made Ross one of its 2008 Genius Grant Fellows.

Here’s his bio from the Foundation website:

Alex Ross is a critic whose writing captures the often-elusive aesthetic and technical aspects of classical and contemporary music with clarity, grace, and wit. A staff writer for the New Yorker, his frequent essays display an expansive knowledge of music and a facility for guiding his readers, who range from professional musicians to scholars to the general public alike, to a richer experience of the complex pieces and artists he explores. With a finely tuned grasp of a full spectrum of styles, he places works by a broad variety of artists – from Mozart to Schoenberg to Bob Dylan – within a continuum and sets aside categories and classifications that impede the appreciation of works on their own terms. In each article, Ross strives to demonstrate how a specific piece of music, be it centuries or months old, conveys meaning and feeling in the present. In addition to his work in essay form, he recently published the book The Rest Is Noise (2007), a cultural history of 20th-century music that journeys through pre-World War I Vienna, Paris of the 1920s, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and New York of the 1960s and 1970s. Through a widely read blog of the same title (www.therestisnoise.com), he further expands the reach of his interpretive skills and enthusiasm for championing overlooked composers and out-of-the-way ensembles. In an era when many proclaim the imminent demise of concert halls due to waning attendance, Ross offers both highly specialized and casual readers new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place in our future.

Alex Ross received a B.A. (1990) from Harvard University. He has been the music critic for the New Yorker since 1996 and served previously as a music critic for the New York Times (1992-1996). His writing has also appeared in the New Republic, Slate, Lingua Franca, and the London Review of Books.

David Stabler

David Stabler, the classical music critic for the Oregonian newspaper, has stated on his blog that he’s not taking a buyout from the paper, and is staying on indefinitely.

It’s good news.  Full-time classical music critics are getting to be as rare as hens’ teeth, and David is the only one left in the state of Oregon, so far as I can tell.

While there are things that he writes that I might occasionally quibble with, having a critic to read on a weekly basis is becoming more of a privilege than a right these days, and David’s done a lot to promote the hard work of many, many local arts organizations, which is much appreciated here in Portland, as opposed to Cleveland, Ohio…

Coming up on Thursday: our first rehearsals for Classical 1 - the might Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.  I’ll give my thoughts as the week progresses.  Meanwhile, check out David’s excellent piece on this oft-faved work (complete with some hilarious internet-sourced quotes from fans) here.