Awl pal Alex Ross gets listy, picking his ten favorite classical recordings of the year. There is some supplementary material here.

Awl pal Alex Ross, who is almost certainly better known as the classical music critic of the New Yorker and the award-winning author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century (which is AMAZING), has a new blog! Bookmark it or put it in your RSS reader or whatever you do with these things.

The 2010 edition of the annual Best Music Writing series is out on November 9th, and they've just released the table of contents. It includes work from Awl pals Maura Johnston, Sasha Frere-Jones, Jon Caramanica and Alex Ross. I don't see how you not get this.

The New Yorker's Alex Ross filed a Freedom of Information Act request on Leonard Bernstein and received the late conductor's "eight-hundred-page F.B.I. file, memos from the files of Richard Nixon's Plumbers, and several lively excerpts from Nixon's White House tapes." In an ongoing series, he looks at how Bernstein's political beliefs and activities were monitored and interpreted by the FBI and the Nixon administration, particularly the "threat posed by 'Mass'-that multimedia, polystylistic spectacle in which Leonard Bernstein dramatized his struggle with God and fame." It makes for very interesting reading.

The scoring on "Lost" is, in a way, extremely successful. Musical cues frame intended emotional response particularly well on the show. The scoring is also extremely repetitive and full of overworked tics. It works, in terms of familiarity; for me, it can grate. Still, the video guide to the sounds of "Lost," hosted by the delicious Alex Ross, serves to make me newly appreciative of the scoring, particularly when you think about someone rubbing a gong with a superball. (And yes, the woman playing those horrid boring harp parts is the very same who played the harp on "The Simpsons" theme. You can be her friend!)