Five to seven years from now, what will the concert world look like in new york city? I don't know. On certain days i feel as though the cons may not recover,. o go back to anything like what it was before. The smaller ones can be more resourceful and more spontaneous in terms of how they react. In terms of chamber music and sola recitalists, that end of the business should be ok. Anhe there's thousands of artists who arent being paid, and some of them ar going to just give up and get other jobs - even extremely talented ones a end. There could be ways in which there will be a healthy effect on the if class...
To Alex Ross, good music critics must be well-rounded and have command of neighboring cultural areas. “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,” says the veteran music journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker. His most recent book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, explores the complicated legacy of Wagner, as well as how music shapes and is shaped by its cultural context.
Alex joined Tyler to discuss the book, what gets lost in the training of modern opera singers, the effect of recording technology on orchestras, why he doesn’t have “guilty pleasures,” how we should approach Wagner today, the irony behind most uses of “Ride of the Valkyries” in cinema, his favorite Orson Welles film, his predictions for concert attendance after COVID-19, why artistic life in Europe will likely recover faster than in America, Rothko’s influence on composer Morton Feldman, his contender for the greatest pop album ever made, how his Harvard dissertation on James Joyce prepared him for a career writing about music, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded August 20th, 2020 Other ways to connect