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Ross, Alex : Listen To This

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York City, NY, 2010

ISBN 0374187746

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 366 pages. Retrospective collection of essays. Now considered a contemporary classic. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. "Autographed Copy" round green sticker pasted in front. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Alex Ross' "Listen To This". Illuminating and adventurous forays on music. Except for one magisterial piece that Ross wrote just for the book, all of the essays previously appeared in The New Yorker Magazine, have been slightly or significantly revised where appropriate, and are thereby the author's final versions. "Utilizes a wide musical scale: Classical music in China; opera as popular art; sketches of Schubert, Bjork, Kiki, and Herb, as a way of understanding the world. Ross offers timeless portraits that probe the ways that the powerful personalities of composers and musicians stamp an inherently abstract medium so that certain notes, songs, or choruses become instantly recognizable as the work of a certain artist. The virtuoso performance comes in the one previously unpublished essay, 'Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues', where Ross isolates three different bass lines as they wind through music history from the 16th-century chacona, a dance that promised the upending of the social order, through the laments of Bach, opera, and finally the blues" (Publishers Weekly). "Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Teaches us how to listen more closely" (Publisher's blurb). Just as his dazzling debut, "The Rest Is Noise", is best read and enjoyed as though it were a novel, his innate sense of narrative allows us to read his new collection as though it were a short story collection. Currently the Resident Music Critic of The New Yorker Magazine, Alex Ross succeeded not one but two of the greatest music critics we shall ever read: Andrew Porter and Paul Griffiths, both Brits. His essays are among the reasons The New Yorker Magazine remains not only relevant but necessary reading, nothing less than one of contemporary life's most civilized pleasures. An absolute "must-have" title for Alex Ross collectors. This Autographed Copy is very prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the title page by Alex Ross. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary classic. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A scarce signed copy thus. Winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008. One of the finest American writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER ALEX ROSS TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0374187746.

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