SOME sage once quipped that writing about music is about as edifying—and evocative—as dancing about architecture. Certainly most music criticism has a lifeless quality, packed with adjectives yet tuneless on the page. Yet Alex Ross, a music critic for the New Yorker, manages to stand out. His gifts as a writer are all the more impressive given that his subject tends to be the most difficult music composed in the last century, from Gustav Mahler to Steve Reich. "The Rest is Noise", his best-selling 2007 book on the history of the 20th century through its music, is now being re-worked as a year-long music festival at the Southbank centre in London. Although Mr Ross was not involved in organising the festival, he will be giving four lectures on the history of 20th-century music. Mr Ross spoke to The Economist about why he wrote this book in the first place, and why it is particularly hard to get contemporary audiences excited about modern music. It took you ten years to write “The Rest is Noise”. What was your motivation?

It emerged really from an obsession that I had with 20th-century music going back to my teenage years. At university I immersed myself in it very heavily with a radio show that I had. I was also studying literature and history—especially late-19th century and early-20th century period—so it all coalesced.

I grew up listening to classical music in the traditional sense, from Bach to Brahms. That was the world I was completely absorbed in. I really didn’t listen to any other kind of music aside from this repertory. So it was something of a shock to slowly realise that there was more to the story, and I was shocked and fascinated when my piano teacher in high school played works by Schoenberg, Berg and Bartok. I started making my way through them at the piano, and after an initial struggle, I really fell in love with the music. I was fascinated by the music itself, by the surrounding cultural and historical context, and wanted to figure out how it all fit together. So it seemed inevitable that this would be the subject [of his first book].

Do you think that people are becoming more willing to listen to contemporary classical music?

I’ve noticed a change in the past 20 years. I’ve been in New York as a music critic since 1992 and I do believe that in some quarters, in some concerts I attend, there is more openness to new music or to the 20th-century repertory.

It depends on where you are. If you are at the New York Philharmonic or the Metropolitan Opera I still feel a sense from the audience around me, in the chatter I overhear at intermission, that there’s an old automatic—and I’m going to be a little provocative and say bigoted, prejudicial response—to this music. And we’re not just talking about Cage and Stockhausen; people will listen to Benjamin Britten—a much more conservative 20th-century composer—and will still say “this is rubbish, dissonant nonsense, why can’t we go back to writing old lovely tonal music.” It is a very frustrating attitude; people have grown up with it, and it can be devilishly hard to persuade them to evolve away from it.

Do you think part of the problem is that people expect music to be comforting, and so are less willing to put effort into engaging with it?

Absolutely. For centuries people have been looking to music to serve a certain purpose: to relax, to have a bit of uplift at the end of the day, to bliss out, zone out and so on. And for centuries, composers have been struggling against this attitude. Mozart tried to figure out how to foist these much more ambitious schemes in his concertos and operas on an audience that was really looking for soothing background music. Beethoven, again, raged against that kind of expectation. Wagner challenged people’s expectations about how they were going to pay attention, how they were going to behave when they arrived at the opera.

It is very different in the art world. People go to a museum or gallery and they expect to confront the unusual and the unexpected—they almost expect to be shocked. Even with older art in a museum, they are not looking for an easy or familiar kind of beauty. No one goes and looks at Picasso’s “Guernica” and asks “well, why is it this way? Why couldn’t he have painted a lovely meadow with flowers?” They know where this work comes from and what it is trying to achieve.

The German writer Thomas Mann appears in the epigraph to your book, and is a figure who pops up throughout. How helpful is literature in approaching 20th-century music?

I had a very intense relationship with that particular work of Mann’s, “Dr Faustus”, going back to my senior year of high school. I was overwhelmed by it, completely gripped. It is a very tricky book to come to terms with.

It shadows a lot of “The Rest is Noise”. At one point when I was working on it I joked that I was trying to write a de-novelisation of “Dr Faustus”. Its entire subject is the relationship between a modernist, radical composer and some of the darkest moments in early-20th-century political history. This is something that is very close to the heart of the book that I was trying to write. I was especially fascinated by these hugely uncomfortable and agonising relationships between composers and dictators—Shostakovich and Stalin, Strauss and Hitler. And Mann was addressing that in “Dr Faustus” and treating it in a very charged and intense way.

There’s a lot going on in that book, and it’s tricky to draw conclusions from it. But the language is tremendous. What really excited me when I first read it as a kid were these extraordinary musical descriptions—descriptions of imaginary works but they were somehow as real, as persuasive as any criticism I had read of “real” music. And it did become kind of a model for me when I started writing criticism of my own. Without becoming vulgar or excessive in my own writing, I’ve tried to recapture some of that vividness and passion in talking about music.

And now you are working on a book on Wagner?

It’s not quite about Wagner. It’s about Wagnerisms, and his enormous, almost infinite impact on other art forms from his death going up to the present day: literature, painting, architecture, dance and film. I’m right in the middle of it now, and it’s at the rather panicky early stage where I have enormous piles of material—and, as with “The Rest is Noise”, I’m trying to figure out how to confine them within a not too ridiculously overwhelming book.

It sounds like it would make a good festival.

It’s not really a music book, that’s the funny thing—possibly it would make an exhibition. Right now I’m just trying to think of how it works as a book. When I was writing “The Rest is Noise” I couldn’t possibly have pictured a festival based on the book. I was hoping for a modest success—everything beyond that was a great surprise and a huge pleasure, and I think of it as a bit of a freak event. I am not quite sure how it came about.

"The Rest is Noise" festival is at Southbank Centre throughout 2013

Read more: "20th-century music: Notes and noise"