"There was an excessive devotion to the past and a resistance to the present. This sets the stage of what happens in 'modern music'."
What happens in modern music is that it gets overlooked and undervalued. Compared with Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, it rarely gets programmed; when it does, audiences stay away.
But Ross, since 1996 the music critic for The New Yorker, has done more than most to try to remedy that. His history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise, is 700 pages of dazzling prose, cogent argument and poke-in-the-eye iconoclasm, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
The Rest is Noise is also the title of the second of Ross' three appearances at this weekend's Auckland Writers Festival. Built around ideas from the book, his last presentation is a words-and-music collaboration with contemporary chamber ensemble Stroma and mezzo-soprano Bianca Andrew.
Once finished in Auckland, they set off on a national tour for Chamber Music New Zealand offering a cherry-picked taster of 20th century music. The concerts begin with a couple of movements from Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, a slightly odd but extremely beautiful work that is hardly performed here because of the composer's reputation as box office poison.
"Stroma did it to mark Pierrot Lunaire's 100th anniversary in 2012," says Hamish McKeich, the ensemble's conductor and artistic co-director. "It wasn't a sellout, even in a 300-seat hall. It's crazy — 100 years old and people are still too scared to programme it."
Ross is equally baffled, comparing how the modernist composers and their contemporaries in other artforms are treated today.
"There were scandals with Duchamp, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and so on, but those artists who were once controversial are now enormously popular. Museums will be mobbed for a major retrospective of Picasso or Pollock."
Most of the Ross/Stroma programme is less contentious than Pierrot Lunaire but similarly neglected, though the pieces are all considered important works representing composers including Ravel, Stravinsky and Boulez. There's music from Aotearoa, too, with selections from Jenny McLeod's mid-60s breakthrough work For Seven and Dame Gillian Whitehead's Manutaki, which was last year given a rare outing by Auckland Chamber Orchestra.
The first of Ross' festival appearances is On Wagner, prefiguring a forthcoming book that examines the composer's influence on all artforms.
"The book is enormously long," Ross says cheerily. "It's a vast subject; no other figure in music has had quite the effect that Wagner does, for good and ill, culturally and politically."
Talk inevitably turns to Wagner's anti-Semitism and ongoing status as composer of choice for the far right: "It shakes your faith in the idea that music makes people better and that music is automatically a force of unification and spreading messages of peace and harmony.
"Very often it isn't; music can divide us as well as bring us together. It's okay to use music as a refuge but it's a form of human expression like any other, and it can easily have negative messages and agendas attached to it."
Ross draws comparisons with the present-day artistic and political climate.
"We're living in a time of rising authoritarianism, democratic government in decline in [the United States] and Europe, and you feel the ghosts rising of circumstances we thought were in the past."
Among those ghosts is the complicity of cultural figures in authoritarian regimes; Ross has been vocal in condemning the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev's close ties to Vladimir Putin. It's unusual for a music writer to take such an overt stance but Ross has an unapologetically broad view of the critic's role.
"I think it's important to have a conversation and debate around music. Not to passively sit back and let music wash over us but to engage with it, to question it, to think about the historical and political factors at work behind our repertory and why it is so heavily dominated by white males and what can be done to change that. I think critics can play a role in leading or starting that conversation."
Lowdown
What: Alex Ross at the Auckland Writers Festival and on tour with Stroma and Bianca Andrew
Where and when: May 18-30, see writersfestival.co.nz and chambermusic.co.nz for details
