Express 5: Alex Ross on Classical Music

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ALEX ROSS, THE NEW YORKER'S classical music critic, doesn't often use his influential pulpit to beat down the overhyped or praise the already-famous to the skies.

Rather, Ross specializes in finding new or underappreciated music, then limning it in precise yet passionate and evocative prose that helps you understand how the music works, gives you a sense of its importance in a larger context and (most importantly) makes you want to hear it immediately.

Ross will be reading from his first book, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," at Politics & Prose on Tuesday evening. In it, he takes on the entire 20th century of classical music, a body of work that still perturbs or raises the hackles of many classical fans.

The D.C. native unearths new beauties in well-known works, such as Sibelius' symphonies and John Adams' operas, and helps find the logic and potency in modernist masterworks that can seem forbidding or inscrutable, such as Alban Berg's opera "Wozzeck." Ross also makes a page-turning narrative out of changes in musical form and fashion by elucidating their deep connections to the fads, movements and tragedies that informed the rest of the century's culture.

"The Rest Is Noise" steers a scrupulously objective course — some favorites emerge in the course of reading, but every composer receives the same sedulous attention — so it was kind of Ross to favor Express with five representative Express 5 lists to point down paths for future musical explorations, refute the blogosphere's constant crying about the death of classical music and represent his D.C. childhood.

Word.

Express 5 contemporary classical works that might appeal to pop listeners:

1. Steve Reich, "Music for 18 Musicians" (Nonesuch, or ECM or Innova). As Reich was preparing to write his sleekly beautiful minimalist masterpiece, he was listening to everything from West African drumming to Coltrane's "Africa" to Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Pop musicians and listeners from Brian Eno and David Bowie forward have fallen under Reich's spell.

2. Arvo Part, "Tabula Rasa" (ECM). In the same year Reich wrote Music of 18, the Estonian composer Arvo Part, rejecting the official atheism of the Soviet regime, found his voice by immersing himself in the church music of the Renaissance. Few people can resist this darkly mesmerizing music, which stands outside of ordinary time.

3. Osvaldo Golijov, "Ayre" (DG). At first listen, you'll think this is a pop record with world-music overtones, punchily produced. In fact, it's an ingeniously worked-out song cycle, uniting the various traditions of Moorish Spain.

4. Nico Muhly, "Speaks Volumes" (Bedroom Community). The young New York composer Nico Muhly has worked with Philip Glass, Bjork, Rufus Wainwright and various luminaries. Go to him for an explication of the finger-cymbal rhythms in Kelis' "Milkshake." More importantly, he writes music of lyrical grace and understated intensity.

5. Igor Stravinsky, "Rite of Spring"; Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the LA Philharmonic (DG). It's not a contemporary piece, but it still sounds like one. There's no matching the psychic shiver that ripples out of a full symphony orchestra as it plays the 200 stomping chords in the second section of Stravinsky's riot-causing ballet.

Express 5 underheard works of the 20th century:

1. Carl Nielsen's Fourth Symphony. The great Danish composer said of this symphony, finished in 1916, "Music is life, and, like life, inextinguishable." As in Beethoven's most famous symphonies, a huge life force speaks through abstract form.

2. Witold Lutoslawski's Third Symphony. In old age, the Polish avant-garde master developed a nostalgia for grand, sweeping, Romantic gestures. This work, first heard in 1983, should by now be a popular favorite: the ending is orchestral showmanship of an exalted kind.

3. Ervin Schulhoff, "String Sextet." The Czech composer Ervin Schulhoff was one of a number of gifted early 20th-century composers who died in Hitler's concentration camps. This alternately robust and elegiac sextet speaks of an annihilated pre-war world.

4. Sergei Prokofiev, "Betrothal in a Monastery." Unlike his colleague Shostakovich, Prokofiev lacked a tragic sense of life; he often responded to the terrors of Stalin's Russia not with anguished musical autobiographies but with narratives of escape. This 1940 opera, based on Sheridan's "The Duenna," is an unlikely comic masterpiece from a dark time.

5. Iannis Xenakis, "Metastaseis." People talk a lot about Xenakis's revolutionary 1954 work, in which notes dematerialize in a molten flow of sound, but you rarely get to hear it.

Express 5 reasons classical music is as alive as any other type of music:

1. A tradition that has existed for 1,000 years, surviving the Black Death, the Thirty Years' War and the Holocaust, has something vital to say.

2. Classical music provides an escape from electronically saturated culture. Beethoven's Ninth, heard live in a concert hall, begins in total silence, and the huge waves of sound that ensue are the result of simple collective effort.

3. Then again, composers today are writing pieces generated entirely on computer, or picking up rhythms from hip-hop, or echoing folk influences from every corner of the globe; they are furiously relevant.

4. Stereotyped as a prim, proper art, classical music can be just as violent, decadent and primitive as anything in pop. See Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

5. There's actually no such as classical music; it's not a style. Composers are simply creative artists reacting to the music of their time and of past times. Their music is infinitely adaptable, and will be around as long as the species survives.

Express 5 albums rocking A-Ross' CD player/iPod/whatever right now:

1. Beethoven Symphonies Nos. 3 and 8, Paavo Järvi conducting the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (BMG). Ultra-familiar works made startlingly fresh.

2. Radiohead, "In Rainbows (self-released)." The secret star of the amazing new Radiohead album is Phil Selway, drumming edgy, spooky patterns beneath lush surfaces.

3. John Coltrane, "Africa/Brass" (Impulse). I've been on a Coltrane kick since reading Ben Ratliff's book "Coltrane: The Story of a Sound."

4. Steve Reich, "Music for 18 Musicians" (Innova). Student and faculty musicians from the Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich., have wowed the new-music world with their new recording of Reich's classic.

5. John Corigliano and Jefferson Friedman, "String Quartets" (Naxos). Modern American Romanticism at its best.

Express 5 things you liked about D.C.:

1. Driving out MacArthur Boulevard into rural Maryland on an autumn day (the rural part has now pretty much disappeared).

2. National Cathedral lit up on a foggy night.

3. Some truly great teachers at St. Albans: Paul Piazza, Paul Barrett, Ted Eagles, Sandy Larson, the late Don Brown, the late Vaughn Keith, and the late Jack McCune.

4. "To Fly!" on the big screen at the National Air and Space Museum.

5. The seemingly infinite sled run my brother Christopher fashioned in Glover Archibald Park after the great blizzard of '78.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Tue., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness)

Written by Express contributor Andrew Lindemann Malone