NY Philharmonic musicians: We were unanimous about Dudamel

Scott says:

Alex Ross has become a Woke critic, who values identity over the music. https://www.city-journal.org/moving-on-from-alex-ross

“It was one more (albeit small) manifestation of a phenomenon I have observed several times over the last few years: that taste in American classical music is a signaling cascade, and that the man upstream of everyone else is Alex Ross.”

“That’s an unlucky thing for the rest of us because, over the last five years, Ross’s writing has become so deeply steeped in the political orthodoxies of social justice that it is no longer possible to accept his criticism at face value.”

“It was in this arena that the new woke Alex Ross first caught my attention. In February 2018, Ross penned a column on the work of Florence Price, a then relatively unknown early-twentieth-century black female composer from Arkansas. “The Rediscovery of Florence Price,” Ross’s apologia for Price’s charming but musically undistinguished output, would set the agenda for a Price revival across the American classical music landscape—one that continues to this day.”

“But suffice it to say, his article unleashed an avalanche of Price puffery riffing on all the themes enumerated above—in outlets from the Washington Post to the Financial Times to the San Francisco Chronicle to Bachtrack.”

“One distinct attribute of the Price boom has been its relative disinterest in the content of her music relative to her political significance. This trope originated with Ross; in his Price paean, he made do with facile comparisons of her work with better-known repertoire. But this practice is observable in other writings of his as well. When Ross stumps for underrepresented composers, both the quantity and quality of his actual music criticism usually declines. A particularly vivid example would come three years later, in 2021, when he attempted a similar puff piece for Julius Eastman (1940–1990), a black and gay minimalist composer whose troubled life bears some comparison with the ingenious New Orleans pianist James Booker.”

“In September 2020, Ross nailed a Black Lives Matter mezuzah to his doorframe when he published an article called “Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music.” The scholar at the center of the piece was Philip Ewell, a music theorist from Hunter College, whose scholarly interests seem to lie less in the analysis of music than in the application of critical-theory principles to our understanding of music historical figures.”

“Ross’s focus on Ewell—at the time little known outside the insular field of music theory—was meant not to challenge him, but to build on his arguments: “The whiteness of classical music is,” Ross wrote, “above all, an American problem. The racial and ethnic makeup of the canon is hardly surprising, given European demographics before the twentieth century. But, when that tradition was transplanted to the multicultural United States, it blended into the racial hierarchy that had governed the country from its founding. The white majority tended to adopt European music as a badge of its supremacy.”

“Hearing America’s leading music critic tell American concert audiences that they like the music they like not for its entertainment, intellectual, or spiritual value, but because it helps them exert power over minorities, lands us squarely in Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory. It was reading this passage a few years ago that first convinced me that the music world might have lost Alex Ross for good.”

“Citing Ewell, Ross advocated for musicians to jettison the “sacralized canon” of classical music.”