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.

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 →]

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!