The Best Listener in America | The New York Observer

The Best Listener in America The New York Observer:

"In 2004, Mr. Ross wrote a controversial piece for The New Yorker called “Listen to This” that it’s probably not a stretch to call his manifesto: “For at least a century, [classical] music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority.” Those may seem like harsh words from someone who writes about classical music, but the essay is really a billet-doux that traces Mr. Ross’s own evolution as a classical music lover, including how his perspective on the genre changed as a college student discovering Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu: “I abandoned the notion of classical superiority, which led to a crisis of faith: if the music wasn’t great and serious and high and mighty, what was it?” Mr. Ross isn’t necessarily arguing that classical music need to be universally appreciated, but he is interested in reorienting it away from the notion that it can only be appreciated by an elite audience, and that it should not exist as an entity completely separate from other genres of music—including punk and hip-hop and pop, all of which Mr. Ross has written about. It’s really a way of thinking about classical music that is forward-thinking, rather than a perspective that privileges the past."