An ingenious musical glossary

Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker and freshly minted genius -- courtesy of the MacArthur Foundation -- marks the release of the paperback version of his prizewinning book "The Rest is Noise" with a new online musical glossary, complete with audio examples.

If you're shaky on what a fugue, adagio, diminished chord, or "12-tone" system is -- or, more basically, what makes a minor chord different from a major chord -- this is the place to go (and to listen).

I can see this as the kind of site that would lead musically curious teenagers (or anyone, really) into deeper waters than they otherwise might discover until years later. Ross said he'd be spending some of his MacArthur prize money on improving the Web site, and that will be money well spent.