Alex Ross discusses the roles of music critics, authors and scholars.

Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Premio Napoli, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2013, the Southbank Centre in London will mount a year-long festival inspired by The Rest Is Noise. Ross has also published an essay collection, Listen to This. He is now at work on a book entitled Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music. Ross has received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A native of Washington DC, he lives in Manhattan and is married to the filmmaker Jonathan Lisecki.