Today I check in with Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His work has also appeared in The New Republic, Slate, The London Review of Books, Transition, Spin, Lingua Franca, and Feed.

How is music criticism different at the New Yorker than it was at the New York Times or Spin?
I wasn't really "at" Spin; I just wrote a few reviews for them. So I'll just talk about the New Yorker vs. The Times, where I was a critic from 1992 to 1996.

At the New Yorker, I have the luxury of more space and more time. The columns are at least 1400 words, sometimes longer, and a few times a year I write a feature piece of 5000-10000 words, which is really why I love the job. Also, instead of making up my mind overnight about a concert, I can sit with my impressions for a few days. This may seem peculiar < I should know right away whether I liked a concert, right? But sometimes it takes a little while to sift through how I feel, to find the right mix of impressions. If I'm writing overnight, I tend to go to extremes of the positive or the negative. I'm like, "John Adams is the greatest composer EVER!" or "Lorin Maazel SUCKS!" And that's not the tone that the New Yorker cultivates, of course.

If there's a downside to being the critic of the New Yorker, and there really isn't, it's that I don't have as much impact on the business of music as I would if I were at the Times. The Times has huge influence, even if the critics don't make or break careers as the drama critics seem to do. But that particular kind of power doesn't appeal much to me. I don't like to have too much weighing on my words. There's another kind of pleasure in being the wrap-up guy, the one who muses over everything at the end, like Andy Rooney, though hopefully with more analytic rigor.

I learned much as Boy Critic of the Times, though. I had to cover things whether I wanted to or not: cast changes at City Opera, semi-amateur bel canto productions, bassoon recitals in Queens. I discovered just how vast my ignorance was. Often, readers got to discover with me.

What have you found more difficult, screenwriting or music writing?
I dabbled very briefly in screenwriting after college. I love movies nearly as much as I love music, and I'd love to find a way to ventilate that enthusiasm. But screenwriting isn't it. It's the most bizarre kind of writing because it has no value in itself; the better it looks on the page, the clunkier it sounds on the screen. I'm not a creative writer: I need something solid to bounce my prose against. The movie was a college romance comedy, by the way. "Reality Bites," made a few years later, turned out to have a similar plot, except that ours was much worse, if you can imagine that. My co-screenwriter, Josh Goldstine, is now an awesomely brilliant and ruthless Hollywood executive.

What advice would you give a new writer trying to make a career out of writing about music?
It's a peculiar profession, music criticism. Especially in the classical arena, where there aren't that many job openings around the country. No more than a few dozen people make a living on it. These days it seems advisable to have a sideline: a lot of papers might want you to cover both classical
music and dance, say, or classical music and architecture, as Justin
Davidson does excellently at Newsday. I got my start writing dozens upon dozens of record reviews for Fanfare. There was basically no pay, but I got to sharpen my style and learn the territory. I was ridiculously lucky to land the Times job at a young age, and even luckier to attract the New Yorker's interest a few years later. Nowadays, of course, blogging is a great way to gain experience and attention.

Do you have a writing schedule, for covering your work for the New Yorker, your book, your blog and your other projects, or do you pay attention to deadlines first and then get to the rest whenever you can?
I'm always working diligently on any number of things, but I usually need a deadline to find my way to the end. Otherwise, the project easily descends into a quagmire of excessive research and rampant graphomania. Balancing my book and my New Yorker writing has been the hardest thing I've had to do in my career. I feel I've been doing a half-assed job on both. No one expects anything from the blog, which is perhaps why it's so easy to do. I'm in a serious panic this summer, so I put the blog on hold. It'll be back in the fall, with some new features, such as Classical Stalker. ("Saw Emanuel Ax
looking at cheeses at Zabar's. He went for a sassy brie.")

Why do you think blogging is good for critics?
I'm not sure if it's good for critics it's an all-too-effective mode of
procrastination but it's definitely good for readers. In the classical arena, people are starved for a national conversation about music, because there are no regular critics at almost every magazine you could name: Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, even The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. Why can't Rolling Stone or Spin publish a classical piece now and then? Rolling Stone used to, but no more. Nor is there classical music coverage on TV, except when Yo-Yo Ma loses his cello or some freak masters the tuba at the age of 3. So people have discovered
the internet and created new kinds of communities there. See blogs by Marion Rosenberg, Helen Radice, Kyle
Gann, Trrill, La Cieca, and The Standing Room.

Writers such as these are changing the tone of the classical conversation, discarding the old guardedness and stuffiness and pseudo-objectivity. They speak with the wit and rage and passion that the art demands. Blogging will probably play a major role in the ongoing revolution and renaissance of classical music, which, I believe, will once again become a popular art in the next 20 years. You heard it here first.