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Conversations with Tyler

Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2020

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

To Alex Ross, good music critics must be well-rounded and have command of neighboring cultural areas. "When you're writing about opera, you're writing about literature as well as music, you're writing about staging, theater ideas, as well as music," says the veteran music journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker. His most recent book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, explores the complicated legacy of Wagner, as well as how music shapes and is shaped by its cultural context.

Alex joined Tyler to discuss the book, what gets lost in the training of modern opera singers, the effect of recording technology on orchestras, why he doesn't have "guilty pleasures," how we should approach Wagner today, the irony behind most uses of "Ride of the Valkyries" in cinema, his favorite Orson Welles film, his predictions for concert attendance after COVID-19, why artistic life in Europe will likely recover faster than in America, Rothko's influence on composer Morton Feldman, his contender for the greatest pop album ever made, how his Harvard dissertation on James Joyce prepared him for a career writing about music, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded August 20th, 2020

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:08.4

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:12.6

Learn more at mercatis.org.

0:15.2

And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit

0:20.4

ConversationsWithT Tyler.com.

0:27.1

Hello, everyone. Today I am here with Alex Ross, who is music critic for The New Yorker,

0:32.6

author of the best-selling The Rest Is Noise. But most importantly, he has a new book out,

0:38.4

fascinating work called Vognorism, Art and Politics and the Shadow of Music.

0:43.9

Alex, welcome.

0:45.6

Thank you so much, one for being here.

0:47.7

I have so many questions about Vognor. Let me start with one.

0:52.1

Why is it I have the perception that the truly great Vognor recordings

0:57.0

come from the 1950s or the 1960s? If I think even of the talk you gave for The New Yorker,

1:03.1

well, you talk about Kyle Barrett and Shultty and Fertvangler, those are ancient recordings,

1:07.8

Clemen Krauss, that was what 1953? What has happened to the recording quality of Vognor?

1:14.0

That's an interesting question. There are great many wonderful Vognor voices today.

1:20.0

And there's always a little bit of a dearth in one category or another we never seen to

1:26.5

be at the moment where there are a sort of a serfin of outstanding voices for every role.

1:33.3

But there's no lack of wonderful Vognor singers. But it is true that there was this extraordinary

1:39.7

outpouring of recordings in the 50s and the 60s. And I think it had something to do with all of these

1:46.4

singers. It was just an extraordinary generation of singers to begin with Hans Hodger and

1:52.5

Austrian Varnai and then Björg Nielsen, a little later Wolfgang Vindgassen. But I think because

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