Alex Ross, acclaimed music critic for The New Yorker magazine, high-profile blogger, and award-winning author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) and Listen to This (2010), will give a lecture (in English) entitled “The Lamento Connection: Bass Lines of Music History” as part of the National Arts Centre’s ‘Musically Speaking’ series. The lecture takes place in the NAC’s Panorama Room at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday February 13. Tickets are $10 and are available at the NAC Box Office and via Ticketmaster.

A question-and-answer session with the audience will take place after the lecture. Copies of Listen to This (provided by the Nicholas Hoare bookshop) will be available for purchase in the Panorama Room and, time permitting, Mr. Ross will be available to sign copies following the lecture. Pre-signed copies will also be available for purchase.

Mr. Ross is one of North America’s foremost music critics -- eloquent, educated, and lionized in the literary music world. Expanding on and drawing on his new book Listen to This, and with the help of a slightly demented iTunes playlist, Mr. Ross will trace recurring motifs, trends, riffs, and bass lines across nearly a millennium of music.

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993 and became the magazine’s music critic in 1996. He has taught writing at Princeton University and now writes about classical music, covering the field from the Metropolitan Opera to the downtown avant-garde, and has also profiled Bob Dylan, Radiohead, and Björk. Ross went to The New Yorker from the New York Times, where he had been a music critic since 1992. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a cultural history of music since 1900, was published in 2007. It won a spot on the New York Times list of the ten best books of 2007, a National Book Critics Circle award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The book has been translated into 16 languages, and is an international bestseller. In 2008, Alex Ross was named a MacArthur Fellow, and he has received honorary doctorates from the New England Conservatory and the Manhattan School of Music. His second book, Listen to This, was published in the fall of 2010. Ross lives in Manhattan and has a blog and a website (www.therestisnoise.com).

For additional information, visit the NAC website at www.nac-cna.ca

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Information:   
Gerald Morris
Communications Officer, NAC Music
613-947-7000, ext. 335
[e-mail]  gmorris@nac-cna.ca