YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Ross

lines on the record: 59
first: 2020-09-22
most recent: 2020-09-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Of Vangold, which is always considered the skirtzo of the ring. And he really brings out that quality and quite different from the later recordings, which are rather more polished and kind of slightly sort of over burnished in terms of the texture. It's all incredibly beautiful.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm getting ready for the publication of the book. I'm building pages on my website, which are kind of guide to Wagner's works beyond what I do in the book. And so I'm going to be recommending recordings as well as giving the synopsis of the plot of the operas instead of pointing out crucial musical moments. So I'm actually working on Reingold right now. I'm listening to Carion's ring cycle, which is never been one of my favorites, but I'm revisiting it. And actually his first live Ringold in 1951 from Bayrewite is amazing. It's a great recording. He connected that one year at Bayreit and then never came back because of, he was carry-on. There were problems. But it's a really vigorous and spiky and lively”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On Death Valley and the Bristolcone Pine Forest, as well as pieces on literature and history. And that is, I think it makes my musical writing better. I think it also makes a case for Klausnu music. If someone has read what I write about Dylan or Radiohead or the Bristolcone Pines and sees my name at the top of a piece about Mozart or Salieri or whoever, they might give me a chance having read those other pieces. Oh, this is the guy who wrote that interesting piece. I don't care about classical music, but I'll give this a try anyway. And so I think that helps me in an inevitable aspect of my role as a critic, which is not merely to be this objective, cold, detached commentator, but to some extent be an advocate. It's a face of the art form itself and expanding its audience in my own little way. And so I think that helps with that mission.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think music critics need to have command of neighboring cultural areas because music is just not separate from the rest of culture from sort of the rest of our world. And 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. And so I think every music critic needs to can't be a pure specialist. And most of my colleagues, I think they all have side interests, and they've all had a well-rounded cultural education. So I think it's essential. I feel very lucky in that I have been able to pursue a lot of writing at The New Yorker, which is not strictly musical. And I've been allowed to pursue this range of interests, which includes some natural sciences type travelogue pieces in the last few years.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He read my fanfare reviews, some of my fanfare reviews, and not much else. I forget what I originally sent him to look at. But he absolutely started my journalistic career. He gave me my first journalistic assignment, and then it was through him at the New York Times became interested in hiring me as their fifth string critic. When that opportunity came my way, I was reluctant to do it. And Leon talked me into moving to New York and taking the job. So he had a huge effect on my early career. But what he saw in this 23-year-old kid, I don't know, you'd have to ask him.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or Charles Ives or Farence Alivis Zimmerman, or certain later 20th century composers. So that Ulysses, I think, influenced my listening and prepared me for unexpected and perhaps irrational juxtapositions of different styles.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, yeah. I mean, Joyce was one of the most musical writers who ever lived, a fine singer, a very acute listener, very comprehensive knowledge of different eras of repertory going back to the Renaissance. And I think Joyce cultivated a taste for me. You know, I fell in love with Joyce and Ulysses in particular before I really got to know the classic works of the 20th century. So I read Ulysses at age 18. At that stage, I was still just kind of struggling to come to terms with Schoenberg and Stravinsky in the early 20th century. So Ulysses gave me a taste for a kind of sprawling, comprehensive, all-devouring kind of, you know, it's the modernism of, it's not strict and spare and disciplined modernism. It's the modernism of all engulfing chaos and music that happens to be a mode that I'm quite fond of, whether it's the symphony.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People ask me that and I don't. I don't have guilty pleasures. I feel that it sort of buys into this idea that there's some exalted kind of level of genius and then the sort of this embarrassing realm down below. But to honestly answer your question, I do like certain oasis songs. That's slightly embarrassing champagne supernova.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No question, Blood and Jacks. Yeah. But the original version, not the Minnesota remix, the original New York sessions without the big band, that's the greatest pop album ever made, in my opinion.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The white album, man, I love the white album, especially, I think, Day in the life is fun in their most extraordinary achievements. Certainly I go back to them a lot.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Favorite Beatles song. I remember being a sort of Beatles person, a more Dylan person. For some reason, I tempted to say Helter Skelter right at the moment, but I don't think that's actually Beatles.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, there are a lot of wonderful composers in that era. It isn't just a handful. I think Feldman actually has a lot of followers in late 20th and early 21st century music. A lot of people have been intensely attractive to that aesthetic. Some of them are just mere imitators, but others have managed to come up with a very individual reaction to his sound. So I think if there's a group of composers called Vandelweiser, they live in different countries and they specialize in a very quiet, very spaced out kind of aesthetic and obvious, very strong influence from Feldman. J ⁇ rg Frei is a Swiss composer who just writes some of the most incredibly beautiful music around today, his string quartets. And he more or less worships Feldman. But Michael Pizarro is an American.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is always quiet. Everything is spaced out. And these harmonies that can be prickly and alarming and unnerving in Schemberg-Bergen Webern and so much other modernist music of the 20th century and Feldman, they become distant and they acquire this eerie beauty. And it's as if you can step way back from them and contemplate them as art objects and they become like of course he loved Rothgo's paintings. He knew Rothgo very well. He knew so many of these early abstract expressionist painters. But especially with Rothgo, it has that misty, distant, unearthly quality, not at all saltive, not at all aggressive, and it becomes this totally new world of radical beauty. And so from the I first heard his music, he just had an extraordinary effect on him, and I still find it one of the great originals in musical history, extraordinary composer.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's one of them. I mean, I love Feldman's music, and Feldman did something really remarkable where he took this modernist vocabulary, the vocabulary of Schoenberg, the Second Beany School, anality, and then John Cage, the student of Schuremberg, brought that vocabulary into the world of sort of creating the sort of post-war American avant-garde movements, and Feldman was a figure, of course, a very important pioneer himself alongside Cage. But it goes back to these unearthly, otherworldly atonal chords of Schoenberg, Berrgen Weber, and that's the fundamental vocabulary of Feldman's music, but it's totally different in terms of its emotional temperature, the dynamic level.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There and their playing change completely. So that's the weird, the sort of slightly occult power that conductors can have, just their mere presence transforms the playing.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dimension. And I think that adds some people. The musicians are excited to be having this opportunity. And they think this might be the last time. And so they give something more. And so that's the mystery of conducting. And I always think of that anecdote about Furtwengler. And I think it was Walter Legg who told this story watching the Orkston rehearse with a different conductor. And they were playing all right, you know, nothing, nothing too inspired. And he's sort of looking straight ahead and looking at the orchestra. And suddenly something changes. Suddenly the playing is electrified, transformed, and the conductor seems to have done nothing different. What is going on? How did that change take place? And then he happens to look over his shoulder. Furtfangler is standing by the door watching. And in the few minutes that he's entered the hall and has been standing at the back, the orchestra noticed.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even before they say anything, just the mere fact when they sort of arrive at the podium, there is a level of respect, there is a level of attentiveness and readiness in the orchestra. They don't have to be won over when Herbert Blomstadt is in front of his reputation. And so Blomstadt, someone like this can just skip all the preliminaries and just go for fine-tuning these points and just everyone plays better because they're in the presence of this celebrated legendary older musician. It's almost as if they don't even need to do anything anymore, but they do, of course. They are working very hard and Vomsted is delivering very particular instructions to the orchestra. But there's this psychological.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, it is an amazing phenomenon. I mean, it's not anecdotal. I think it could be statistically verified that conductors live longer and keep working longer than most professions, perhaps almost any professions when you have Tuscanini active well into his 80s. There's also just conducting is so mysterious in terms of what is actually happening between the conductor and the orchestra. There are explicit messages being sent. There is instructions being given, but there's also this slightly mystical side to it, where once you get to a figure like Clemerer or today Bernard Hytink, who just retired, or Herbert Lomsted, who is incredibly vital and active in his 90s.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up in DC, so I have some experience with this. I don't know. It's always going to be a mix. I would know if I could put a percentage on it, but there are certain quite a few people who go out of a sense of obligation. You know, this is just something that they have their subscription tickets and the Joneses down the street are going. So we might as well go. So that's always been a component of the American orchestral audience or the opera audience, but especially the orchestral audience in terms of these orchestras that have become real civic institutions and certain families, wealthier families in the city have supported them for generations. And it's just there. It's a fixture and people show up without necessarily being deeply involved in it. But you need those people.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Berlin with Simon Rattle, various other places. And so it's not a lost cause in terms of converting audiences to the new and different.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think an average audience would have found it quite pleasant to listen to. It was in no way dissonant or modernistic. And afterwards, older couple sitting next to me said, oh, that was, oh no, and then there was a piece by Pierre Boulez right after that. And what the older couple said was, ah, finally some real music. They didn't like the tonal easy music. They were waiting for the Boulez. And so it just varies very much from place to place. And the stereotype of the classical audiences that they're not going to be adventurous. They always want the tried and true. But over time, I think when an institution, a festival really shows commitment to this repertoire, they can change the audience's mind. That's also what happened with the Los Angeles Philamonic under SACA Salinan. It happened to some extent in”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So well that doesn't prepare them so well for something different and new. One of the most adventurous audiences I've ever encountered is at the Ohi Festival in Southern California, northwest of Los Angeles. That's a festival that goes back decades in terms of its commitment to new music, quite adventurous, often avant-garde music. Stavinski was there, Bulez went many times. And so the attitude there is almost just the complete opposite of what you normally encounter with a classical music audience where the more complex and the more difficult it is, the more excited people seem to get. And I just had this wonderful experience of sitting in the audience once and a few years ago at Ohi. And there was a piece that was, it was quite tonal and repetitive and minimalist.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just in terms of just being whisper quiet and concentrating at every moment, it's a cliche, it's a stereotype. But in the German-speaking world, that's where you find this kind of audience where it just seems as though everyone is concentrating, especially if you go to a chamber music concert in Germany or Austria. This music is just so steeped in countries traditions and so many people of different social classes and backgrounds have grown up with it and it just feels so natural to them. So you get that appreciation now in terms of adventurousness. That's a slightly different thing. Those same Austrian and German audiences may be quite resistant to 20th century music and contemporary music because they love and know Brahms.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If people are making noise at the beginning of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, you're not going to hear this whispery, this ethereal tremolo. Of course, same thing with the beginning of Wagner's ring cycle, which begins almost subliminally with this deep E flat in the double bases and the tradition of Bayroid is to become completely silent before that happens for a full minute or so, there's this total silence in the opera house, which is a wonderful effect to be able to really experience music emerging out of nothing, emerging out of silence. It's very powerful. So there's good reason for some of these rules. And I think just ultimately, it should be on a case-to-case basis. We have a thousand year tradition in classical music with very different kinds of music, with very different social intentions.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, there have been experiments in that direction. I think my attitude toward it is there should never be hard and fast rules. So I object to this absolutely dogmatic kind of sensibility that one must not ever make the slightest noise during a performance. One must never applaud after the first movement of a concerto or a symphony, that kind of thing is nonsense to me because just certain of these pieces, they cry out for the emperor concerto, the end of the first moment of the emperor concerto. It just sounds weird not to have applause because Beethoven is working very hard to make the audience burst into applause even more with Tchaikovsky, first piano concerto. So I think these rules can be loosened, but at the same time there's very good reason for why audiences generally are quieter at classical performances because of the dynamic extremes.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Round from continent to continent, singers zipping around, orchestras, touring, probably unnecessarily, just because of the fear of travel at this moment and just other questions about the sort of wastefulness of this kind of travel, that may be cut back. And I think it actually be a very healthy thing if conductors just spent more of their time with their orchestra than they are, the music director of instead of feeling the need to guest conduct in 10 other places during a given season because they're being paid usually pretty hefty sums of money, 800,000 dollars or a million dollars or more. And just why not really concentrate your career at one place, work on building ties to the community immediately around you and just forget about this global marketplace, which that end of the business will just be much more difficult to negotiate.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Toward being paid, and some of them are going to just give up and get other jobs, even extremely talented ones. And that will certainly be a tragedy. And just when you look at the difference of the situation in Europe, where artists who are out of work have nothing to worry about, they're being taken care of financially. They have health plans. They can afford, they're able to wait it out. Here, people aren't going to be able to wait it out and they're just going to give up and do something different. And so it'll be a dark period. I just don't know exactly what form it'll take, but things will be very different. There could be ways in which there will be a healthy effect in the end if classical music becomes more local in focus. Just for decades, we've had this culture of constant jet setting, conductors zipping around.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just going to be the very last to come back along with sort of really the other performing arts forms. It's an art form that subsists on crowding people into an indoor space and then sort of having a crowd of people on stage for a certain period of time. And even if the medical question is resolved, even if there is a vaccine, there'll still be a psychological block against people coming back. There'll be a fear of crowding into spaces. So I am fearful of what's going to happen, especially to the bigger institutions. I think the smaller ones can be more resourceful and more spontaneous in terms of how they react. And so they might recover more quickly in terms of chamber music and solo recitalists and that end of the business should be okay. But it's also the artists. I mean, there's thousands of artists.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, on certain days, I feel as though the classical world may not recover or sort of go back to anything like what it was before because the damage has been very severe. And once people get out of the habit of going to concerts, it can be very difficult to persuade them to come back. I mean, this is what happened to the metropolitan opera after 9-11 for a little while. People were just very reluctant to come into the city. And some of them just never came back. And they just developed new sort of cultural habits. So it's a very some days, I'm very worried. Other days, I feel as though there could be a sort of more or less total recovery in perhaps five to seven years from now. It'll just be this strange nightmare that we all kind of went through before going back to normal. But a classical music is...”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, and there's so many. Yeah, I mean, I immediately think of some of the Wagner transcriptions. There's incredible transcription that he made of the first transformation sequence in Parsifal, the ringing of the bells. It departs somewhat from the opera, from Wagner's score, but it feels as though it's very much still of Parsifal's world. And Liszt had every right to kind of do what he wanted with Wagner because Wagner took from him and Liszt also took from Wagner. They had a sort of very complex relationship. There's a great deal of mutual borrowing that went on. So when he arranges Parcefal, he is to some degree arranging a couple of his own ideas as Wagner appropriated them and sort of taking them back. So that's a kind of wonderfully rich. Relationship there.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite is Touch of Evil. You know, I don't know if I necessarily call it the best. I mean, in terms of sheer technical accomplishment, Citizen Kane will always be remarkable because that's the movie where he just had, always he had the most resources and the most control. But I just absolutely love Touch of Evil. I think taking this rather seamy, sleazy genre picture and investing so much weirdness and darkness and slyness and menace into it is just, I think it's an astonishing achievement. I just get such this kind of visceral pleasure out of watching it every moment. It's just wildly entertaining. And also, I think rather deep in terms of how it talks about power and the His character, the policeman who frames the guilty man. It's a wonderfully sort of complex problem that it poses for the audience”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I expect not. I'm not a fan of work. I don't fan of his use of the Tristan prelude in melancholia, his apocalyptic, the end of the world movie, another planet is about to collide with Earth. And you hear the prelude over and over again until it just seems to sort of wear itself out and become this kitsch object. Who knows? I mean, maybe he would have done it brilliantly, but I'm just not the biggest enthusiast of his work in general. And there's all kinds of problems with Lars Vanchier in terms of his attitudes on various subjects. So it probably wouldn't have been the ideal choice for Bayreuth at the moment.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To some extent, culture of those days didn't offer so many strong female archetypes and Wagner certainly did. So there's a number of novels that you find, plays, other works, paintings, works in visual arts where that female power of the Valkyries is celebrated. And it was inspiring for some women of the period. So that's maybe an irony that Coppola was.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shulty hammers too hard. It's always overbearing. There's a kind of a sort of unnecessarily brutal edge. And it's not coincidentally, it's the Schulte recording of Bide of the Valkyries that you hear in Apocalypse Now, because that's just the most aggressively hard-hitting one, and it goes with this sort of spectacle of masculine aggression. The great irony of that scene, of course, and of so many other usages of ride of the Valkyries, is that it's all men. It's male soldiers exulting in their kind of lust for destruction. The scene in Devalkya is all about women. It's all about these unusually powerful women. And at the turn of the last century, as I talk about in the book, Brunhilde and the other Valkyries became feminist icons.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hans Hotter saying voton magnificently any number of recordings, somehow there he's at least as good as he ever was, if not better. And it just feels so of a piece. And it was recorded for release, then this recording never came out. So it sounds very good for its time. But you could really go to, I mean, there's also 1953, pretty much the same cast with Clemens Kraus conducting Krauss is probably a greater conductor, sort of maybe makes more out of certain expressive moments. And so that has much to recommend it as well. One recording that I don't like is Garib Schulte. And this is the classic, this was the first complete studio ring. It was a great feat of recording for its time in terms of the use of stereo.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would pick the 1955 ring cycle from Bayroit conducted by Joseph Kyle Bertz, who's not one of the most celebrated conductors. His name is not instantly recognizable as Surf Wingler is Toscanini and so many others. I think maybe precisely because he didn't seem to have some great interpretive scheme to bring to bear. He just sort of disappears into the music and sort of the music itself comes alive. It feels very spontaneous. You just hear more of the constant shifting of moods, the constant kind of psychological instability. But above all, it's just an incredible cast. I mean, I ask Judvar and I is my favorite Brunhilde, and she just sings splendidly in that record.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Atrocious atrocious stereotype of monastatos in the magic flute. And so that is, I think that is a problem to be conscious of. Beethoven was a misogynist. I mean, so many of these composers were misogynists. So Wagner had a lot of bad qualities, but he was not the most evil person who ever lived. And so I think, again, to create this black and white, where these composers on the one hand are pure and innocent, and Wagner is infused with evil, I think, is a mistake. I mean, Wagner teaches us not to idealize Wagner in that way.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Role that it once had on the world stage and in culture today. I just don't think you're going to see some kind of new Hitler arising enthused by Wagner and unleashing terror on the world. So I think we can go too far and demonizing Wagner. I think it's a mistake to say that Beethoven and Mozart and Bach were all these sort of wonderful pure liberal humanist figures and Wagner was this evil, irrational proto-fascist nationalist, anti-Semite. I mean, the magic flute by Mozart is unambiguously racist in a way that no work by Wagner is because Jews are not present explicitly in any of Wagner's operas. It's theorized that there are stereotypes at work, but there's no unlabeled a Jew in Wagner. There are no black people in Wagner. There is this.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I don't feel there's a present clear and present danger with Wagner in today's culture. If you look at what's going on in the world, if you look at the threats that we face, if you look at racism in contemporary America, if you look at inequality across the globe, you can't, you know, Wagner is not lurking behind really any of this. It's happening today. What is at work in ways that I don't think we're fully conscious of or we haven't analyzed enough is all of this American popular culture that we think of as innately good and pure and innocent. It's our music. It's music from the people. And yet it is unquestionably mixed up with American history and present-day American politics. So Wagner isn't to blame for any of this. And just because classical music no longer has anything like”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quality is fusion of qualities. But it all went wrong. He had the potential to become that kind of universal figure and he did not, because of his anti-Semitism, because of his extreme nationalism. And so it shadows his achievement. There will always be this asterisk next to Wagner. And you're always aware of that issue. But I think that doesn't, that in a weird way enriches the experience for me to be conscious of all this darkness. It takes this body of work out of the realm of the ideal, this idea that music just lifts us up and takes us into this other world for a little while and we're entertained or we're sort of led into this sort of sublime sphere and then we come back to reality.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had it in him, I think, to become a cultural figure on the scale of Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, there's a universalism. There is this profound psychological understanding coupled with this flair for painting on the huge canvas and manipulating mythic motifs. He had this extraordinary combination of creative qualities, the ability to compose, to create the texts for his operas, his skills as a theater designer. I mean, he essentially designed the space of Bayreuth, which was revolutionary in the late 19th century as a director, a director of theater, as a theorist, just a very singular, almost unprecedented, unsurpassed collection of”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very conscious of Wagner's anti Semitism and the chain of influences that lead to Hitler. And I just saw him as this problem of intellectual history, this problem of cultural history. I spent a lot of time studying the period of the Fandus Jecla, the culture and history of that period, especially in Europe, and Wagner was just this shadow, was this lurking presence. And it wasn't until later, it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I began really seriously listening to Wagner as music, experiencing him as theater, and beginning to have a less negative and eventually a much more enthusiastic or sort of deeper engagement with the music, but always with wariness, always with a consciousness of how this extraordinary figure who really”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it should always be wary, listen to Wagner. And my whole history with Wagner was actually I started out really averse to the entire sound world. I mean, when I was a kid growing up with classical music, I tried listening to Loingrin. I checked records of Loingrin out of the public library and I put them on and just I only could stand it for 10 minutes or so. Of course, I knew nothing about anti-Semitism and Nazism in the connection with Hitler. It was just purely a question of the sound. I found the sound disturbing and just kind of this sort of seasick feeling of bobbing from one chord to another without sort of clear demarcations. I just had this kind of instinctual revulsion to it. And then when I started revisiting Wagner in college, it was always from the point of view of the intellectual problem of Wagner. I was by that time.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enormous. And of course, that's only one side of Wagner's aesthetic, but it's a very well known side divided the Valkyries, the entry of the gods, Stigfried's funeral music, these just very powerful, heavy-hitting moments in Wagner. So there's been always been a kind of this rumor, this kind of just a hint of the Wagnerian in heavy metal. And I think going back to Led Zeppelin and their fascination with the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien kind of brings them into the zone of the Wagnerian, the hammer of the gods and so on. So maybe that's one area where you can talk about the Wagnerian and popular music.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know again because Wagner is a theater composer, so it would have to be someone from the theater world. It's not about songwriters. So I would sort of look to, I don't know if there's anyone on Broadway in the Broadway musical world who is working in this fashion, but that's the world where you would expect a kind of Wagnerian effect. I mean, it's not a musical, but I always think of Angels in America as a very Wagnerian enterprise because of its scope and its interweaving of realistic and mythic elements and the layers to it. In terms of people talk about the Wagnerian in rock, this is very, very loose kind of understanding of what it means to be Wagnerian. It just means grand and heavy and pounding.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was not a great humorist by any means, but there is a heavy kind of wit. I mean, there's always this question about de Meistersinger and this is supposedly his great comedy. I don't find it to be particularly hilarious piece. And it's of all the Wagner operas, it's the one I've always had the most difficulty with for various reasons that we could maybe get into. But there is the ring certainly has irony. It has, there's the sense of detachment from the characters. The characters are being observed from various angles. And so if not quite laugh out loud humor, there are alienation effects involved. There are moments of rupture where you're breaking out of the characters' own delusional ideas about what's going on. Sort of seeing it from another angle, and there's a kind of darker kind of Laughs and light moments by any means.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you take the entire conception in the theater, when you experience it as theater, that's when it really comes alive and reveals its full power.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Off the giants for the building of Valhalla, and it's always funny to remember that the ring is a story of contractors not being paid for their work. And so it is supposed to be dramatically ironic. It's an empty spectacle. It's a hollow spectacle. And I compare it to the end of Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Cletumestra and Aegisthus entering the palace at the end of Agamemnon. And so when you pull out the excerpt, you lose those levels of irony, those levels of dramatic richness. But, you know, it's impossible to resist. I mean, you can't listen to the entire operas and from end every time you want to experience the highlights as the feeling moves you. But I do feel that Wagner is always at his rich.”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was lost and that the dramatic purpose of these excerpts tended to disappear when they just became orchestral showpieces. Take, for example, the end of Rheingold, the entry of the gods into Valhalla. It's a grandiose, splendid kind of, not quite uplifting, but it's just very energizing. It sort of makes you feel grand and important listening to it. It's just the sheer pleasure and the power of mast orchestral sound. But in the context, and I talk about this in the book, it's absolutely ironic. This is a catastrophe unfolding. The gods entering Vahala, ignoring the pleas of the Rhinemaidens to return the ring to the Rhine. Votan has struck this evil bargain to pay”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, that's perfectly valid. And the orchestral syntheses that were devised by Stachowski and many other conductors are very entertaining to listen to. And it's an interesting question about excerpts and Wagner. He always had a kind of ambivalent attitude toward the extraction of excerpts from his works. On the one hand, it was a great marketing device, and he was a brilliant marketer. He was a master of publicity and branding and sort of all these modern techniques. And he knew that pulling the music of the ride of the Valkyries out of De Valkyra would spread his fame because that piece had an electrifying effect on audiences of Momo was first heard. Same with all the other excerpts from the ring and the other operas. But at the same time, he always felt that something was”
2020-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source