Listen to This Quotes

“The best kind of classical performance is not a retreat into the past but an intensification of the present. The mistake that apostles of the classical have always made is to have joined their love of the past to a dislike of the present. The music has other ideas: it hates the past and wants to escape.”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This

“Finally, three smashing chords to finish, obviously intended to set off a roar of applause. I start to clap, but the man with the score glares again. One does not applaud in the midst of greatly great great music, even if the composer wants one to! Coughing, squirming, whispering, the crowd suppresses its urge to express pleasure. It’s like mass anal retention.”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This

“The difficult thing about music writing, in the end, is not to describe a sound but to describe a human being.”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This

“For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority.”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This

“The principal irony of the history of recording is that Edison did not make the phonograph with music in mind. Rather, he conceived of his cylinder as a business gadget, one that would supersede the costly, imperfect practice of stenography and have the added virtue of preserving in perpetuity the voices of the deceased.”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This

“critics have been methodically exploring this terrain for many decades, trying to figure out exactly what happens when we listen to music with no musicians in the room.”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This

“The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in one of its saner moments, defined music as “a specific variant of the sound made by people.”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This

“The fetishizing of the past had a degrading effect on composers’ morale. They started to doubt their ability to please this implacable audience, which seemed prepared to reject their wares no matter what style they wrote in. If no one cares, composers reasoned, we might as well write for one another. This was the attitude that led to the intransigent, sometimes antisocial mentality of the twentieth-century avant-garde.”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This

“O melhor tipo de interpretação clássica não é um recuo para o passado, mas uma intensificação do presente”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This