Alex Ross ’90, the acclaimed music critic of the New Yorker, is an advocate of experimenting with forms and venues for presenting classical music beyond the traditional concert-hall format—lest the audience for such performances decline further, undercutting the economics of the art form. His most recent dispatch, in the magazine’s February 8 issue, describes the alarming demographics of classical music-goers, and the music he recently heard presented at a club, (Le) Poisson Rouge, where just as violinist Hilary Hahn, offering a short Bach program, “launched into the majestically doleful Chaconne in D Minor, a plate of nachos arrived at my table.”
Ross was profiled in “An Argument for Music,” by Paul Gleason, in this magazine’s July-August 2008 issue. His new book, Listen to This, is listed in Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s catalog for publication next October. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award and was a 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008.
