Alex Ross

In Listen to This, the award-winning music critic and author of The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross looks forward and backward in musical culture: capturing essential figures in classical music history, as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music.

From his own first encounter with classical music to vibrant sketches of Schubert, Verdi and Brahms; from in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead to the lives of a high school’s music students, Ross shows how music can express the full complexity of human experience. He explains how pop music can achieve the status of high art and how classical music can become a vital part of wider contemporary culture.

Witty, passionate and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us to listen more closely.

Reviews of Listen to This

- ‘A magical mystery tour. The literary equivalent of an iPod on shuffle’ Guardian
- ‘Intensely illuminating. He wants to show you what is important about music, how it connects to the world and why you should care’ Observer
- ‘Dazzling. No one writing about classical music today has Ross’s gift for lateral thinking, for pinning down references and cues and scraps of sound that elude the rest of us’ Sunday Telegraph
- ‘Ross can stride nimbly over the keyboard of time and style without losing his ear for the feeling behind the form’ Independent