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.

Alex Ross, music writer for the New Yorker, who was Pulitzer shortlisted for his music history page-turner The Rest Is Noise, and blogger at the site of the same name, just wrote a review of the series presented at Carnegie Hall by the Brentano Quartet, which concerned the late works of a variety of composers.

How many classical music critics (or any other journalists for that matter) do you know who can regularly turn out such prose as this in the course of their beat?

Whatever it is that allows artists to maintain their powers of invention as they grow older, composers possess it more richly than most. Musical figures from Monteverdi to Messiaen have had careers that can be plotted as steadily rising curves. In old age, certain composers reach a state of terminal grace, in which even throwaway ideas give off a glow of inevitability, like wisps of cloud illumined at dusk

That’s seriously good stuff.  Read the rest here.

Throughout history, the great works of literature (whether well-received or not) have sparked equally great works of literary criticism.  Alex Ross’ brilliant history of music in the twentieth century has sparked criticism of the highest order - most lately by the great British tenor Ian Bostridge, writing in the Times Literary Supplement (think the English equivalent of The New York Times Review of Books).

Thanks to E. for the tip.

Here’s a taste:

Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise tells the story of what happened to Western classical music in the twentieth century. We all know that the invention of recorded sound around 1900 made possible an extraordinary dissemination of the riches of the classical repertoire - largely composed for the rich and powerful - to the mass of ordinary people. On the gramophone, the radio, television and, subliminally and hence more powerfully, through the movies, the classical sound in all its variants (even the supposedly rebarbative confections of the Second Viennese School) has insinuated itself into the culture at large. Never before have so many people listened to, or liked, so-called classical music. Yet this extraordinary triumph has culminated in a malaise, a feeling, widespread in the musical profession and elsewhere, that classical music is in crisis and that things have never been so bad. Classical music feels abandoned, left behind as history has moved on, sulking in its tent as the real cultural action happens somewhere else.

I’m sure that many of you may have seen this elsewhere, but for those of you who have not, here is the video: [Read more →]

The Seattle Chamber Players presented their fourth Icebreaker Festival of contemporary classical music this past weekend in Seattle. Present was current classical music writer/rockstar Alex Ross, who curated a concert of works by seven young New York composers who’d caught his ear (including five premieres). [Read more →]

Alex Ross, classical music critic for the New Yorker, and critically-acclaimed author of the critically-acclaimed book The Rest is Noise, and bloggie-nominated-finalist blogger, will appear on the Colbert Report tonight, Tuesday January 29, 2008 (guest subject to change, would be the required caveat).  Go figure!

See the video after the jump (click on title above or link at left to view entire post and see video). [Read more →]

I’m just one chapter into Alex Ross‘ magnum opus (so far) The Rest is Noise (Listening to the Twentieth Century). I’m loving it so far, and have learned several things so far that I never knew, but should have at least been aware of, specifically that Strauss’ Salome was not premiered in Vienna, but in Graz, and that Adolf Hitler may have been in attendance at the premiere. I was also not aware of the amount of interaction between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. My bad! Alex’s good!