Over the weekend, Alex Ross, the New Yorker music critic and author of the excellent books ''The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century'' and ''Listen to This,'' called for a protest against the Times Magazine. He had his reasons: The annual mix I make honoring the musicians who died the previous year did not — once again — include any classical musicians.
''This annual insult to people who love classical music,'' he wrote on his blog, ''deserves a protest.'' What particularly irked him was the omission of the eminent avant-garde composer Elliott Carter.
This is a drag for two reasons. First, Ross is an excellent critic, and not one who confines himself to classical music. (He is the author of what I consider the the single-most-illuminating passage about the band Radiohead.)1 Second, he is simply the most prominent voice in a small but apparently very angry contingent that I feel great empathy for. But I must say — they have missed the point.
The Music They Made is not intended to be an encyclopedic record of dead musicians. Nor is it meant to represent the peak of our musical achievement, like the Voyager Golden Record. It most closely represents a K-Tel commercial, and that's the conceit: this is a greatest hits collection of artists who apparently have nothing in common beyond having died in the same calendar year. And yet as a sound collage, the unity is often surprising — who knew that Ravi Shankar and Earl Scruggs segued so well together? The unspoken (and rather obvious, if you ask me) criterion to inclusion is that these are artists who have affected popular culture. They are, in the broadest sense of the word, mainstream. The songs in the mix are part of the popular soundscape. Elliot Carter — no doubt to our impoverishment — is not.
Does this in any way diminish the accomplishments of Elliot Carter? You might as well ask whether Carter got any airplay on WCBS.
Ravi Shankar, though a classical musician, is in the mix. And the reason he is there should be obvious: he greatly influenced popular culture.
This is not a bias against classical music. Every year rock musicians are left off the mix, and every year I hear about it. Last year, I failed to include Peter (Sleazy) Christopherson, a founding member of Throbbing Gristle and Coil — two unflinchingly transgressive bands that not only altered the history of avant-garde electronic music but which I also personally admire. Sleazy didn't make the cut for two reasons; he was not central to the popular culture, and — no less important — it's really hard to harmoniously shoehorn a few seconds of Throbbing Gristle among Phoebe Snow, Clarence Clemons and Césaria Évora.
I don't mean to be coy. I fully empathize with Ross and devotees of classical music. I, too, grew up a fan of a music that was marginalized and ignored by the mainstream. Such was the life of punk acolyte in suburban Pittsburgh in 1982. I still bitterly recall attending a Gang of Four concert and opening the Post-Gazette the next day in the futile hope of seeing the review. My friends and I thought that the critic of the paper was a buffoon, and his taste was terrible, but would it be too much for Gang of Four to get a few column inches? Needless to say, the critic was not among the 60-odd who saw the influential post-punkers. He did manage to turn in a glowing review of R.E.O. Speedwagon (I think it was), who played at the Civic Arena.
That said, I gladly welcome suggestions from Ross or anyone else during the coming year for what classical music to include in a future (all classical?) sound collage.
1. From ''Listen to This'': What set "Creep" apart from the grunge of the early nineties was the grandeur of its chords — in particular, its regal turn from G major to B major. No matter how many times you hear the song, the second chord still sails beautifully out of the blue. The lyrics may be saying, "I'm a creep," but the music is saying, "I am majestic."
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