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Notes on MusicBen Ratliff and Alex Ross discuss the state of the art form and the experience of listening.


Posted Thursday, Nov. 8, 2007, at 5:42 PM ET

Music critics Ben Ratliff and Alex Ross were online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, Nov. 8, to chat with readers about the state of jazz, pop, and classical. An unedited transcript follows.

(Continued from page 3)

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Alex Ross: Dear readers and Ben: I have to go catch a plane, but thanks so much for this dialogue. I will think more about all the comments here, especially those I didn't get to answer (hello, Rockville MD!). Bye for now!

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Denver: Concerning the comments that "everything's permitted, and nobody's listening" and "there's a certain kind of music lover who, when asked why the art form has lost appeal, will say, 'X went too far!": Don't limits in art also help to maintain a consensus and doesn't the absence of limits brings about art's niche-ification? "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."—Orson Welles.

Concerning Mr. Ross' comment that "perhaps my main mission as a critic is to urge readers to bend an ear to the new..." what about the underrated, overlooked and neglected—of the past? Concerning Mr. Ratliff's question, "do you think that at some point there's going to be a deep confusion about what's really important?"—I thought that critics were supposed to act not only as guides, but also as gatekeepers, explaining us why certain pieces of music are worth listening to more than other pieces of music? "Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why."—Henry Van Dyke

Alex Ross: I prefer to think of myself as a guide rather than a gatekeeper. Music is too personal a medium for anyone to be issuing graven-in-stone proclamations about what matters and what doesn't. In fact, I can't stand that style of criticism; it tends to backfire and to create resentment against that which it is trying to support. However, I hope that my enthusiasms (together my negative reviews) offer up a picture of what I consider to be truly important. I love writing about forgotten composers. The Austrian opera composer Franz Schreker, for example, who is finally re-emerging from the shadows after disappearing from view in the 1930s.

Ben Ratliff: In "Making Sense of Wine," Matt Kramer says that a connoisseur can say "This is a great wine, but I can't stand it." Okay: that's pretty much what we try to be able to do. I think we're both writing about music of the past—in my case, sometimes too much, according to some readers.

The best limits for artists are the self-imposed ones. The limits I don't like are the limits of commercially applied categorization.

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Rockville, Md.: I hope to get this in in time ... I'm a black girl who loves Coldplay, Tori Amos and basically anything that people wouldn't "expect" me to like. Why are we still so narrow-minded in how we think in regards to musical "racial lines"? Sure, it's cool for other races to embrace R&B/hip hop ... but see me at a Morrissey concert and you'd think I'd invaded a secret world!

Ben Ratliff: Yeah, it's sad, isn't it? Those walls are meaningless where music is concerned and it's good to get over them. I'd even expand this issue to generations. Always being in an audience where everyone is pretty much the same age/race/cultural demographic as yourself doesn't teach you much. I really dislike the idea that there are kinds of music you "should" and "shouldn't" like because of who you are. Well, maybe we're slowly getting beyond that...slowly, though.

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Ben Ratliff: Good to hear from all of you. Thanks for taking part in this.

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Ben Ratliff is a New York Times jazz critic. His new book is Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Alex Ross is The New Yorker's music critic. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has just been published.
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