"Mr. Gershwin," he said, "music is music."
Music has come to be seen as all things to all people in the past century - the age of modernism and technology, mass production and unprecedented documentation. But such vast diffusion has necessarily obliterated the possibility of any one sound embodying something for everyone.
Alongside the rise of ever-mutating popular styles, from ragtime to Rage Against the Machine, the monumental human achievement of the classical music canon has disintegrated into an unsortable rubble of eggheaded, stubbornly introverted factions. Or at least that's the perception, suggests Ross, who readily admits the genre is now "widely mocked as a stuck-up, sissified, intrinsically un-American pursuit."
But despite routine pronouncements of the death of the form, with record sales and attendance figures evidently plummeting, Ross sees classical music as a consistently viable analog to the historic course of the century. The early days of radio and television were saturated with culturally edifying master performances, and Broadway showed Hollywood how life's bottomless emotions can be expressed by a symphony orchestra.
Charlie Parker and John Coltrane were intimately attuned to the music of Stravinsky and Sibelius, and the present-day pop music of Björk and Missy Elliott could not have emerged without the pioneering minimalism of Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Music history, Ross writes, "is too often treated as a kind of Mercator projection of the globe, a flat image representing a landscape that is in reality borderless and continuous."
In that spirit, Ross's history is freely associative and impressively omnivorous. Decades are vaulted, and then revisited, in pursuit of various strains. Key figures - Richard Strauss, Shostakovich, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, Reich - create recurring motifs in the narrative.
