As some of y’all have read, we published a fairly controversial piece on Alex Ross, our former crush and erudite music critic for The New Yorker. Then a friend of ours sent in a comment likening Ross’s prescription for the future of new music (which is always a critique of the present) to Barrack Obama’s political platform. It was a stretch, and our friend qualified his comment as going off the deep end. Still, interesting points were made.

Well, turns out, some peeps over in Seattle–the city that is hosting the concert of contemporary music that has been curated by Ross and fellow critic, Kyle Gann, of Post-Classic and Village Voice notoriety–got wind of our post and started “slogging” about us.

Here’s the original post on the blog of Seattle’s alternative weekly, The Stranger. Then there’s a counter post by Classical In Seattle. The comments on the Slog get pretty far off topic, so we posted this in an attempted to bring things back around to the original issue. I’ll post the full comment after the jump.

Hello, Slog:

Thank you for linking to my post on Alex Ross, to which a reader responded via email, likening Ross to Barack Obama. Allow me to refocus the scroll of comments back to the original idea.

The person who left the comment, a friend and colleague of mine, enlightened something for me that I had been thinking of since the 2004 presidential election. Why did the Democrats lose? (Well, it was at least way too close, even if you still don’t believe the final outcome was legit.)

I should say that, generally, I don’t like to make political analogies to art. Art is a place where you can be unorthodox, experience emotions that are not appropriate otherwise (entertainment at violence, for instance). And artists can adopt any executive model they see fit for their work, whether they are fascist, communist or democratic.

But where I agree that contemporary Democratic politics exude something similar to that of Alex Ross’s prescriptions for contemporary music is in their rhetoric. The Democrats have leaned so far to the right, apropriating conservative jargon like “family values” and “homeland security” and the like, that THEY FAIL TO PROVIDE A VIABLE ALTERNATIVE TO THE NORM. Even Obama, in his message of change, basically sounds like he means to achieve the same things Republicans are aiming to achieve, only he thinks he can do it better. Other than his position on an imediate troop pullout, I don’t see how his social or economic policies differ all that much from the Republican status quo.

Likewise, Alex Ross seems to propose that the various genres of music, which real people actually find joy in their various differences, should all blur away into one vast homogeneity, and that, even more alarming, we are in an age of “post innovation.”

There is little in the world that can capture the diversity of the human spirit the way music can. As the saying goes, “Variety is the spice of life.”

I propose that our new composers find their own voices, their own style, their own comment on the culture of music. I also maintain that classical music remain a viable alternative to popular idioms. Why would I go to Carnegie Hall to hear salsa music, when I can go to a salsa club to hear that kind of music, especially when the opposite isn’t true (for instance, you won’t hear Boulez at a salsa club).

In much the same way, I encourage the Democrats–or anyone else if the Democrats aren’t going to do it–to provide a real, conspicuous, emphatic alternative to the politics of neo-conservatism and the status quo of domestic and foreign policy.