Ouch! (I hated Burns’ baseball and jazz docs). That’s true, but I think one of the issues is that the publication and subsequent success of the book obscured the idea that it was never intended to be an academic exercise. I knew going in it wasn’t going to be a rigorous survey of the 20th century orchestral/operatic literature, it was going to be a book about his enthusiasms, an expanded version of his New Yorker columns, if you will. Fair enough, I share some of those enthusiasms (Salome, Britten, Schreker), some I’m totally opposed to (minimalism). He had to structure his book and he chose The Great Man narrative.

What I find funny is one of the complaints about the book has been the sections on the last 30 years; I’m 48 and about 10 years ago, I realized that I saw music from a lens of when I first became obsessed by it. In my case, it was the acid rock of Hendrix and Cream, which lead to prog rock, which lead to classical and opera. I’ve never liked basic 3-chord “good time rock & roll” ever, can’t stand reggae etc. So, here I am, 40 years after being blown away by “Wheels of Fire” and “Electric Ladyland” and I’ve accepted that there’s never going to be a really big sea change in what I look for in music.

Mr. Ross’ equivalent of Cream and Hendrix is minimalism, obviously, specifically Reich and Adams. I remember one of the few times I’ve read anything of his that came across as angry was when Adams’ “The Flowering Tree” got trashed by some European critics. I LOL’d because I recognized that: the Adams fanboy didn’t like his hero having potshots taken at him. Mr. Ross seems oblivious/uninterested in a lot of European trends of the last 30 years, but that’s OK, it’s his book, not mine.

As for Adams, I think he’s past his best, to say the least. I loved the stuff up to ca. “Nixon in China”, but “I Looked at the Ceiling” is the most godawful thing I’ve ever heard from a major composer and most of the stuff since is……what’s the correct damning with faint praise word?….pleasant. I was at the premiere of “Doctor Atomic” in San Francisco and as I said to a friend afterwards “Since he’s often stated he doesn’t like opera, I wish he’d quit writing the damn things”. It was amusing to hear the music start to use modernist cliches that were passe 40 years ago and mein Gott in Himmel is the text setting bad.

As for Corigliano, I’d say he’s a pastische-ist. I think his best work has been the soundtrack to “Altered States” actually, though I’m curious to hear what revisions he’s done to the poor “Ghosts of Versailles” when the Met revive it in a few years.

Dan-
Maybe “schmaltz” isn’t the right word to describe Adams, but there is something idle about his work. It just doesn’t go far enough. And, listening to both him and Corigliano, I don’t feel like there’s much to learn from either composer. Their music, even though they sound quite different as composers, rings of a similar self-gratification.

But my guess is, what you’re reacting to is the fact that it’s much more difficult to pen a positive critique than a negative one. It’s always easier to be mean. In this post, for instance, you and your friend each hold up two composers for ridicule without managing to name a single living composer whose music you enjoy. I love Ross when he goes on the offensive—why do composers insist on titling their music to sound like science experiments? he asks, or, why are Boulez’s interpretations of neoclassical Stravinsky so tepid?—whereas his old article on the Golijov Pasión, a piece that Ross of course loves, is my least favorite thing he ever wrote. And I love Boulez! I love those science-experiment pieces, too!

What’s admirable about Ross is that he is so much more interested in writing about his enthusiasms than about those things upon which it would be so easy to heap a helpin’ of facile critical scorn. For instance, in his NPR interview re: Noise, he was quick to defend Schoenberg’s music, however misguided Schoenbergian teleology must seem (to him, but hopefully to all of us?) in retrospect.

I agree that it’s nearly as foolish to fashion a narrative in which eclecticism is the Ultimate Triumph of Musical Aesthetics. A severe, uncompromising aesthetic can be bracing, refreshing, and an all-inclusive one can be an insipid muddle. But these are functions of the individual composer’s craft, not just his or her insistence on Purity or Newness. I mean, John Adams, composer of the Chamber Symphony, a “fashioner of idle schmaltz”? Really? Corigliano, composer of the String Quartet? These are composers who reward close analysis as well as casual listening. I think that’s a nifty twofer.

You suggest that Ross’s concept of “the new” is inconsistent here; it seems to me that what Ross is advocating, and rightly so, is an embrace of the new, along with an end to the fetishization of innovation for its own sake. I think that we should admire composers like Adams and Corigliano for their eagerness to synthesize the work of mavericks like Reich and Nancarrow with our inherited language of musical sentiment. They may “fail” to break with the past, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also making something terrifically new.