Joyce's Ulysses shaped Ross's taste for all-engulfing chaos

Reading Joyce's Ulysses at age 18, before fully knowing the classic 20th-century modernist works, gave Ross a taste for a sprawling, comprehensive, all-devouring modernism of all-engulfing chaos rather than strict, spare modernism, which prepared him for unexpected and irrational juxtapositions of styles in music such as the symphonies of Charles Ives.