Tag: Alex Ross

Bookmarked The Musicological Zest of “Switched On Pop” by Alex Ross (The New Yorker)

A typical “Switched On Pop” episode pairs a contemporary hit with a musical topic—modal scales, descending bass lines, modulations, and so on. The strategy that Sloan used when he taught harmony by way of “Call Me Maybe” remains in play. Because the songs are so familiar to much of the audience, the hosts can wallow in technical lingo without fear of losing people. A sly bait and switch is at work: the conversation often wanders far from the song in question, ranging across pop-music history or delving into the classical past. For me, the switch operated in the opposite direction. For the sake of listening to Sloan and Harding musicologically jabber away, I received an education in the mysteries of the modern Top Forty.

Alex Ross breaks down the music podcast Switched on Pop. He explqins how and why it works so well, labelling it as ‘mutual mansplaining’ between Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding.

As a ‘persnickety classical-music critic’, Ross takes particular note of their four part series on Beethoven’s 5th Symphony touching on the different tack taken. Personally, this is one of the things I habe noticed more lately, that the podcast has started diving into the worlds of different artists and with that using different approaches. This maybe in part based on the extension of the ‘mutual mansplaining’ through the involvement of more guests and what might be described as bramd cross-pollunation.

It is interesting to contrast this approach with that of Kirk Hamilton’s Strong Songs. I feel that Hamilton spends a lot more time in the weeds and often covers a wider range of music, but like Switched on Pop, often ends up diving into various detours.

Bookmarked The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music by (New Yorker)

Alex Ross on the environmental costs of streaming-music services like Spotify and Kyle Devine’s recent book, “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music.”

In reviewing Kyle Devine’s book, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, Alex Ross reflects upon the the materiality of music. From the materials used to record music to the energy associated with streaming, Ross discusses the various parts of music. This feels like it sits in the same vain as The New Dark Age.
Liked How Wagner Shaped Hollywood by Alex Ross (The New Yorker)

The chief lesson to be drawn from the case of Wagner is that the worship of art and artists is always a dangerous pursuit. In classical music, the slow, fitful learning of that lesson has had a salutary effect: contemporary European productions of Wagner’s operas routinely confront the darker side of his legacy. Perhaps it is time to contemplate the less fashionable question of how Hollywood films and other forms of popular culture can be complicit in the exercise of American hegemony—its chauvinist exceptionalism, its culture of violence, its pervasive economic and racial inequities. The urge to sacralize culture, to transform aesthetic pursuits into secular religion and redemptive politics, did not die out with the degeneration of Wagnerian Romanticism into Nazi kitsch. ♦

Liked The Force Is Still Strong with the “Star Wars” Composer John Williams by Alex Ross ([object Object])

When Williams set to work in the second week of January, 1977—he gave me the date after consulting an old diary—he fell back on the techniques of golden-age Hollywood: brief, sharply defined motifs; brilliant, brassy orchestration; a continuous fabric of underscoring. The film-music scholar Emilio Audissino has described the “Star Wars” score and others by Williams as “neoclassical,” meaning that they draw on a sumptuously orchestrated style associated with such Central European émigrés as Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. “Neoclassical” is a better label than “neo-Romantic,” since Williams is so steeped in mid-twentieth-century influences: jazz, popular standards, Stravinsky, and Aaron Copland, among others. When he writes for a Wagnerian or Straussian orchestra, he airs out the textures and gives them rhythmic bounce. “The Imperial March,” from “The Empire Strikes Back,” for example, has a bright, brittle edge, with skittering figures in winds and strings surrounding an expected phalanx of brass.