Critic extols modern music

Critics, as a breed, tend to shy away from the spotlight as a general rule. The story is the artistry they’re criticizing.

Still, despite his self-effacing demeanor, New Yorker music critic and now bestselling author Alex Ross, who talked to a small but devout audience at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach on Friday night, can’t help but absorb the limelight.

Reading the opening pages of his 2007 book on the evolution of contemporary classical music, “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,” it’s not hard to see why Ross, just older than 40, has attracted so much attention not just from connoisseurs of classical music but from a general public eager to understand how modern classical repertoire can even be called music.

Right off the bat, when Ross describes composer Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” as a “blood-soaked, dissonant, sublimely dark opera,” the reader realizes that this is a unique brand of musical criticism and analysis that tries to illicit an emotional response.

Ross told his Newport Beach audience that one of his main goals as a critic is to convey that even 20th century classical music, which so many dismiss as self-righteous, calculated noise making, is actually very visceral.

After a young life filled mostly with the 18th and 19th century greats — Beethoven, Mozart — did he begin to appreciate 12-tone music and other modern styles, and it took listening to records at his own pace, he said.

Most people get their initial experiences with contemporary music crammed into a concert hall and forced to sit still and silent for hours at a time.

“At a certain point in an audience you can sort of hear everyone giving up and it’s over,” Ross said.

Through a presentation full of musical examples played from his laptop computer, the critic showcased his vast knowledge of the connections between composers and their historical contexts, a mainstay of the book.

At one particularly amusing juncture in the crowd’s eyes he traced Iannis Xenakis’s “Metastasis,” which inspired the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” which in turn inspired the trailer that movie theaters play to flaunt their surround sound systems.

Reporter ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at [email protected].