Alex Ross's Blog, page 2

The music of the night

Like thousands of others, I've fallen in love with Jackie and Shadow, the bald-eagle couple who nest in a Jeffrey pine high above Big Bear Lake, California. One of the scattered joys of this grim year has been watching Jackie and Shadow raise two plucky eaglets, Sunny and Gizmo. (Local schoolkids chose the names.) Expertly positioned cameras allow fans to observe the family at close range. This video features exchanges between Jackie and Shadow, who are empty-nesters for the moment, Sunny and Gizmo have gone off on their Grand Journeys, as the aquiline lingo has it. Their cackles and chortles can't be described as conventionally musical, but they have a distinctive contour, designed, perhaps, to cut across large distances. Something remarkable happens at 10:45. A nocturnal eagle chat seems to prompt a howl from a solitary coyote, whereupon a veritable oratorio of coyote calls ensues, echoing in the valleys around the lake. Beneath it all is a pedal point of crickets.

René Leibowitz conducts Sibelius

Yes, the same man who wrote Sibelius, le plus mauvais compositeur du monde. Leibowitz was actually quite an interesting conductor, and his Beethoven cycle with the Royal Philharmonic, once notorious for its quick tempos, now sounds modern and bracing. This recording of Valse Triste, however, seems almost deliberately inept, as if Leibowitz were trying to substantiate the thesis of his pamphlet.

A David Conte moment

Flashback: Inuksuit in Tijuana

I shot the video above during a performance of John Luther Adams's Inuksuit as the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018. My account of the event appeared on the New Yorker website.

A Martinů moment

A voyage into the harmonic uncanny.

The Book of Murch

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Anyone who loves film should read this book. No matter how much you know, Murch knows more.

A very long Michael Hersch moment

Earlier this year, Emi Ferguson and Jacob Rhodebeck gave the premiere performances of Michael Hersch's two-hour-long, twenty-nine-movement cycle scars plummet to the corners, for flute and piano. A complete video is now on Hersch's channel on YouTube. At Ojai in 2022, I heard Ferguson and Conor Hanick play two movements from the cycle, and was enthralled. I'm still absorbing and making sense of the complete work, but it's obviously a staggering achievement. Unfortunately, the stream is interrupted by ads, but perhaps some of you have paid the premium that removes that annoyance. 

Eighty years after Hiroshima

At The New Yorker, John Hersey's monumental 1946 article and Jane Mayer's account of its impact. Also, in June, E. Tammy Kim wrote about the bombs' forgotten Korean victims.

For Wallis Annenberg

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May P-22 greet you, from a safe distance.

Les richesses de Bru Zane

Romantique. The New Yorker, Aug. 11, 2025.