Cervantino 2014: New Yorker's Alex Ross on Writing about Music

Alex Ross & interpreter at press conference

With the Cape Verde beat, hiphop, post-Shakespearean choral music, and the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas already behind us, what a pleasure to listen to a speaker who has considered how so many musical forms meet in this millennium.

Alex Ross, the New Yorker music critic and currently the only one writing full-time for a magazine in the United States, opened the Cervantino’s Training Workshop on Criticism in the Performing Arts and Music. His topic: The Present State of Music Criticism. 

The respected, widely read critic started by saying “Journalism is a declining industry, Critics in general have been disappearing from the printed page, including music critics." 

"My job is to report honestly on unrepeatable events What I listen to represents a great deal of work by the composers and performers. A critic has the responsibility to explain.”

He mentioned that until the beginning of the nineteenth century, performers mostly played the contemporary music of their era. By 1875, however, work by dead composers dominated the scene, as it still does.

Joroge Volpi taking Alex Ross to see the Juarez

A former English major, the speaker advised workshop members to use strong, colorful, precise language, saying they should read great prose and poetry. On his desk beside a style guide, he keeps a book of poems by his writing hero, Wallace Stevens. 

Ross, who started at the New Yorker when he was twenty-eight, gives his editors credit for guiding him in writing well. “From them, I learned a minute change can make a difference.”

He said writing for an audience with varying degrees of musical knowledge is a challenge. Writing a review can take three to four days. “I am fortunate in not having to meet a daily deadline.”

Afterward, an audience member asked Alex Ross about studies on educating children to a broad range of music. “I wish I knew of some,” Ross replied with interest, adding that children often respond well to music by Stockhausen and other contemporary composers.

[For a deeper look, see Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) and Listen to This (2011), available in both print and ebook editions].

Cervantino 2014: Two Festival Jewels

Many Cervantino events I remember for years have taken place in the smaller spaces. This year is no exception. I came out of the Cervantes walking on air after watching the dance company Tumakka't DAnza Contemporanea perform Rua de Lavradio, named for a street in Rio de Janeiro. Afterward, everyone I
 knew was smiling except for one sober-faced fellow who turned out to feel the same way as everyone else.

dance photos courtesy of FIC 42, G. Morales

The Festival commissioned the work from choreographer Fernando Melo, born Brazil but who lives in Europe. The dancers in the troupe hail from Mexico, Venezuela, Panama and Cuba and Belize. Mauricio Ascencio of Mexico City working with Melo, created a set of five planks that the dancers used first one way and then another.This multi-talented guy also designed the costumes and the lighting.

Altogether, a lucid, colorful performance, adding up to fifty minutes of pure pleasure and for sure a jewel in this year's Festival crown.

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Ohnishi combines an American hairstyle with her habit of bowing.
Photo courtesy of FIC 42, Christa Cowrie

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In the Salon de Consejo of the University the audience listened to the Japanese musician Takae Ohnishi play music from France and contemporary pieces by composers of Asian ancestry. She played suites by Louis Couperin (1626-1661), the the uncle of the other Couperin and by Antoine Forqueray (1671-1745), interlaced with a piece by the eminent 20th century Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, whose work is familiar to Salon audiences;  the Cervantino program describes him as one of the authentic sound poets of our time; Rain Dreaming comes from one of his less experimental periods.

After lulling us into a meditative state with the French pieces and the first movement of a work by Lei Liang,
Ohnishi cut loose with the jazzy, contemporary rhythms employed in the rest of Liang's piece and in the short pieces by Machiko Asaoka. I'll never listen to a harpsichord again without forgetting these other possibilities.

Tadae Ohnishi is one of many musical border crossers. Born in Japan, she now lives in San Diego and tours her homeland.