Alex Ross (music critic)

Alex Ross (born 1968) has been the music critic of The New Yorker magazine since 1996.

Ross is a 1986 graduate of St. Albans School and a 1990 graduate of Harvard University, where he studied under composer Peter Lieberson and was a classical music DJ for the college radio station, WHRB. He also earned an A.B. in English summa cum laude for a thesis on James Joyce.

From 1992 to 1996 Ross was a music critic at the New York Times. He also wrote for The New Republic, Slate, the London Review of Books, Lingua Franca, Fanfare and Feed. He first contributed to The New Yorker in 1993 and became a staff writer in 1996.

His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a cultural history of music since 1900, was released in the U.S. in 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the U.K. in 2008. The book received widespread critical praise in the U.S., garnering a National Book Critics Circle Award, a spot on the New York Times's list of the ten best books of 2007, and a finalist citation for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. The book was also shortlisted for the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

He has received two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism and a Holtzbrinck fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. Alex Ross married his partner, director Jonathan Lisecki, in Canada in 2006.