The New Criterion

Alex Ross
The Rest Is Noise: Listening
to the Twentieth Century.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 640 pages, $30

Alex Ross’s book is about one fifth or quarter music analysis, which is good and proper, coming from The New Yorker’s astute music critic. For the rest, we get much that is historical, biographical, anecdotal, philosophical, and, to a modest extent, aesthetically evaluative. The writing is of literary quality, not all that frequent in books about music. Ross, moreover, is a genuine polymath, and adduces a good deal of nonmusical history, social observation, parallels to the other arts, and discussions of popular music, which, as he argues, has a very porous border with modern classical music. Nevertheless, the claim of the jacket blurb that this is “not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music” and, as Ross himself affirms, “the twentieth century heard through its music” is a trifle grandiose. We learn much, for instance, about Hitler’s and Stalin’s involvement with music and composers, whether positive or destructive. But that isn’t quite like getting the full roles of these dictators in shaping modern history. Still, there is much useful cultural history.

For me, the first major distinction of the book is the elegant, witty, often even poetic style. This allows Ross to convey through imagery and aphorism much that cannot be expressed otherwise. Consider:

At the height of [be]bop, electric strings of notes lashed around like downed power lines on wet pavement.

Or this, about Messiaen:

The consonances are sometimes more terrifying than the dissonances that surround them. They are tonality transfigured, rising from the dead.

Or:

Unlike a novel or a painting, a score gives up its full meaning only when it is performed in front of an audience; it is a child of loneliness that lives off crowds.

Here I must confess to an idiosyncrasy that a critic is entitled to, but a historian perhaps not: I have strong musical preferences and antipathies. I have scant tolerance for composers the like of Boulez, Stockhausen, Reich, Glass, Adams. Much of Messiaen and all of Cage and his disciples is of no interest, let alone pleasure, to me.

On the other hand, I do appreciate Berg, a fair amount of Schoenberg and Webern, some of Messiaen and Henze, and quite a few others among the “moderns.” I do regret that some composers who matter a great deal to me are mentioned by Ross only cursorily or not at all. They may not be major, and they may not have been innovators. But neither are some who are favored by Ross: I find it peculiar that there is more about Bernstein than about Barber, whom I consider the equal of Copland, about whom there is a whole lot more.

Granted, 543 pages of text, and a very little additional information other than bibliographical that is included among the notes, are not all that much when a whole cen- tury is covered—from Strauss’s Salome to Adams’s Nixon in China—and not just superficially, to say nothing of ample attention to jazz and pop. It must be noted, however, that with a few exceptions, opera gets less attention than symphonic and chamber music. Still less space is devoted to art song and instrumental music.

Yet it must be stressed that whenever his interest is fully engaged, Ross is amply perceptive, eloquent, persuasive, and remarkably informative. Extended sections of the book about specific composers are exemplary; thus a joint one about Mahler and Strauss, and individual ones about Sibelius and Britten. Other figures, like Schoenberg and Stravinsky, fascinatingly pop up in various sections, like the Joker in the latter’s ballet Jeu de cartes. But then, among Latin Americans, for instance, Villa-Lobos and Revueltas get all too brief attention; Ginastera and Camargo Guarnieri are not even mentioned. Among the British, Elgar and Tippett get sympathetic notice (too much for the latter); Vaughan Williams and Walton are shortchanged; Bax, Bliss, Delius, Alan Rawsthorne, and Lennox Berkeley don’t even exist.

Again, can one honestly write about Russian music with Scriabin and Miaskovsky getting only minimal notice? The section on Sibelius may be the finest in the book, and includes passing reference to Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Sariaho. Otherwise, modern Scandinavia does not exist: no Rautavaara, Salinen, Rosenberg, or Blomdahl. Germany and Austria do well enough, but even France is underrepresented: Fauré and Dutilleux are rather scanted; Chausson and Roussel exist only in their references to other composers. Sauguet figures only as a member of a gay subculture; d’Indy, Françaix, Ibert (composer of the sublime Trio for Harp, Viola, and Cello) not at all. In Spain, Turina and Montsalvatge are ignored. And so, subjectively, on.

Even America suffers. Where are those noteworthy women, Amy Beach and the English-born Rebecca Clarke? And what about such important immigrants as Bloch, Tcherepnin, and Tansman? Not a word about any of them.

What Ross handles well in his roughly but not slavishly chronological progression is movements, filiations, influences—also negative, often rebellious, reactions. So it is that Debussy, Bartók, and Shostakovich, for example, crop up, sometimes a bit surprisingly, in various contexts. Ross is also good about the theoretical writings of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Messiaen, and other composers, as well as of theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Richard Taruskin.

But there is a piece of writing that figures more prominently than any other throughout The Rest Is Noise; it is Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. This deals with the life of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn, who makes a Faustian compact with the Devil and rises to unholy prominence. As Mann wrote in his book about the making of that novel, the problem was “to freely invent a musician’s existence, which has its credible place among the real cast of modern musical life.” Although Schoenberg, despite disavowals, was the main prototype, and Adorno the chief adviser on musical matters, any number of others, past and present, Mann read about or talked to provided biographical or compositional traits to Leverkühn.

Ross compellingly traces the importance of the book for our understanding of atonal and dodecaphonic music, as well as Leverkühn’s significance for sundry musicians who read and were, or may have been, influenced by the novel.

The effect of the Weimar Republic and of the rise of Nazism on German music could not be more vividly evoked, as is that of the two World Wars and the Cold War on the music of those eras. So, too, the victimization of Prokofiev and Shostakovich under Stalin, and the effect of the Great Depression on American musical life, which had much to do with the leftist politics of Copland and others.

The isolation and loneliness of Sibelius are graphically described in both human and musical terms. The gradual toning down of the figure of Peter Grimes from pedophile sadist, as he was first conceived, to misunderstood soul is well conveyed, along with an excursus on the frequency of homosexuality among composers, which, though suggestive, could have been even more incisive than it is.

Illuminating, too, are the surprising relationships between very different kinds of musicians Ross alerts us to.

When Charlie Parker came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the Rite into his solo on “Salt Peanuts.” Two years later, playing Birdland in New York, the bebop master spotted Stravinsky at one of the tables and immediately incorporated a motif from Firebird into “Koko,” causing the composer to spill his scotch in ecstasy.

Ross aptly explains that Parker, “While paying his respects [was] also declaring his freedom with a somewhat impudent air.” Note how much information Ross packs into a few sentences, not only about Parker but also about Stravinsky, lapping up a dubious compliment more eagerly than his drink.

Yet Ross can succinctly convey even more, as when he tells us that the jazzman John Coltrane relished Bartók’s chords of fourths in the Concerto for Orchestra, and presumably made use of them in his music. Sometimes, though, the correspondences are unconscious: “When Mingus explicated his ‘pedal point’ style … he could have been paraphrasing Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language, with its schemes of multiple modes.”

Cannily, Ross will enrich his biographical data with physical and behavioral ones. Here is his sovereign description of the young Stravinsky:

With his egg-shaped head, bulging eyes, and luxurious mouth, Stravinsky had a slightly insectoid appearance. His manners were elegant, his clothes impeccable, his jokes lethal. In every way, he personified Rimbaud’s dictum “Il faut être absolument moderne.” If there was something of the dandy or aesthete about Stravinsky, he did not create an artificial impression in person. His mind was in perfect sync with his body, which he kept in trim gymnastic condition.

Ross, furthermore, has a nice, understated sense of humor: “Whenever the American dream suffers a catastrophic setback, Barber’s Adagio for Strings plays on the radio.” Again: “Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory, where he struggled for several years to write a cantata sufficiently dull to win the sinecure of the academically oriented Prix de Rome.” Or again: “One way or another, all American composers are invisible men.” Not laugh-out-loud stuff, but tartly put: “Aaron Copland hardly looked the part of the Great American Composer. He was a tall, wiry man with an angular bespectacled face, resembling an awkward office clerk in a Hollywood genre picture.”

Descriptions of music are just as pungent. For example:

In several masterpieces of Bartók’s last years—the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), the Second Violin Concerto (1937– 1938) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1943)—the ceremony of homecoming is repeated. The final movement of each work brings a palpable feeling of release, as if the composer, who had observed peasants with shy detachment, were finally throwing away his notebook and entering the fray. Strings whip up dust clouds around manic dancing feet. Brass play spectacular chorales, as if on the dented steps of a tilting little church. Winds squawk like excited children. Drums bang the drunken lust of young men at the center of the crowd. There are no sacrificial victims in these neoprimitive scenes [an allusion to The Rite of Spring], even if some walk away with bruises. The ritual of return is most poignant in the Concerto for Orchestra, which Bartók wrote in American exile. Transylvania was by then a purely mental space that he could dance across from end to end, even as his final illness immobilized him.

Mind you, if Bartók had been shown this interpretation, he may not have recognized and shared any of it. But it is an eloquent example of what in German is called Einfühlung, feeling one’s way into something, in this case works of music. By offering one form of exegesis, the writer nudges the reader toward undertaking his own, perhaps vastly different but no less valid one.

Ross’s profuse and extensive musical analyses look, to my layman’s eye, similarly convincing and compelling, but those I cannot judge. Moreover, Ross is an apt retailer of anecdotes such as this one:

In 1952, [Cage] scandalized a crowd at Black Mountain College by saying that Beethoven had misled generations of composers by structuring music in goal-oriented harmonic narratives instead of letting it unfold moment by moment. At a New York gathering he was heard to yell, “Beethoven was wrong!” The poet John Ashbery overheard the remark, and for years afterward wondered what Cage had meant. Eventually, Ashbery approached Cage again. “I once heard you say something about Beethoven,” the poet began, “and I’ve always wondered—” Cage’s eyes lit up. “Beethoven was wrong” he exclaimed. “Beethoven was wrong!” And he walked away.

For me, Ross serves an especially useful function in the last hundred or so pages of his book, in which—usually without taking sides—he offers a detailed history of the last half-century or so in music, much of which is totally preposterous and ludicrous, even funnier than a dreadful Hollywood movie that takes itself seriously as Art. The absurdities of Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen, Reich, Glass (who “eventually vaulted to a level of popular recognition no modern composer since Sibelius had”), and a number of lesser lights are all hilariously there, although I regret to say he champions Reich and Adams, and perhaps even worse others, e.g., Tan Dun and that meretricious magpie Osvaldo Golijov. And just how good is a work by Brian Ferneyhough, “figurehead of the New Complexity,” that is “testing the outer limits of what players can play and listeners can hear”?

Note also how Ross’s usually elegant style goes haywire when he declares that “Glass and [Robert] Wilson discovered that minimal harmonic movement and minimal onstage action can together suggest a canyon of emotion behind the stage, a zone of nameless loss.” Or note the sweat expanded on behalf of his beloved Steve Reich (whom he also celebrated in a recent New Yorker piece) and Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which he includes in a list of his ten most recommended recordings: “As in Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, the seeming stasis of the sound encourages the listener to zero in on seemingly inconsequential details, so that the smallest changes in orchestration have the force of seismic shocks and something as simple as a bass line going down a half step sends chills up the spine.” To which I say with Hamlet, “I know not ‘seems’”—or “seeming” and “seemingly.” Those are weasel words; for me, stasis is stasis indeed, and the inconsequential details produce, so far from seismic shock, crashing boredom.

What, one may ask, is Ross’s book saying beyond the historical record? Are American composers really invisible? Is the story of Franz Schreker’s 1912 opera, Der ferne Klang (“The Distant Sound”), really, as Ross writes, “essentially the story of this book: the cultural predicament of the composer in the twentieth century”? Surely not quite. Unlike the ultrapessimistic Norman Lebrecht, most notably in his book The Life and Death of Classical Music, Ross is not a doomsayer, even though he is aware of that view:

From a distance, it might appear that classical music is veering toward oblivion. The situation looks especially bleak in America … . To the cynical onlooker, orchestras and opera houses are stuck in a museum culture, playing to a dwindling cohort of aging subscribers and would-be elitists who take satisfaction from technically expert if soulless renditions of Hitler’s favorite works.

I agree that the situation is not quite so desperate as that. But then again, I do not share the optimism of “Confusion is often a prelude to consolidation; we may even be on the verge of a new golden age”—especially not as Ross envisages it:

The microtonal tuning of Sonic Youth, the opulent harmonic designs of Radiohead; the fractured, fast-shifting time signatures of math rock and intelligent dance music, the elegiac orchestral arrangements that underpin songs by Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom: all these carry on the long-running conversation between classical and popular traditions.

To me, alas, not only “the rest,” but also much of what Ross preconizes, and even canonizes, is noise.

Still, The Rest Is Noise is an eminently worthwhile book, despite certain sloppinesses that, coming from such an erudite author and so prominent a publisher, I find surprising, some of them even producing seismic shocks. Thus Schoenberg’s early masterpiece is Gurrelieder, not Gurre-Lieder; Berg called his hero Wozzeck, rather than, correctly, Woyzeck, not because it was “easier to pronounce.” It was more easily singable, and followed the earlier edition of Büchner’s play by Franzos, who misread, in the author’s difficult handwriting, “yz” as a double z. It is absurd—and anachronistic—for Ross to describe the penultimate scene of the opera Wozzeck as the Doctor and the Captain are “marveling at the uneasy stillness … as if … studying a canvas at a Secession exhibition.” No less unfortunate is the summary of the plot of ~JENUFA without mention of the crucial slashing and disfigurement of the heroine’s face.

Ross doesn’t quite do justice to the details of Albéric Magnard’s tragicomic death; Debussy’s charming work is called “En blanc et noir,” not “En blanc et en noir,” which besides changing the meaning is uneuphonious. Jean-Louis Barrault was a distinguished actor-director, not a playwright; when his last name appears without the first, Falla, not “de Falla,” is correct. When describing Dieter Schnebel’s 1961 piece, Abfälle I/1, where the composer invited audience contributions of talk, moving about, and various noises, Ross doesn’t point out that Satie’s “furniture music,” decades earlier, had called for the same. Nor does Ross, as he usually does, translate the German title, which, only too aptly, means Offal.

There are also grammatical, usage, and spelling mistakes I would not have expected from Ross and his editors. Thus we get “nerve-wracking,” “sentences such as this,” “eager, even anxious,” “disinterested” for uninterested, “parameters” for perimeters, “alternately” for alternatively, “careening” for careering, “a mutual associate,” and Reich’s music “transpires in the open air.” And, in a Latin quotation, “kaedit” for caedit—there is, of course, no K in the Latin alphabet.

But these are minor blemishes that could easily be corrected by the next printing, and do not seriously detract from the book’s important accomplishments. I do wish, though, that Ross would ponder, if he reads this review, his own wise dictum, “From the fact that some great music has been once rejected, it does not follow that any rejected music is great.” I realize that my rejection of some of his favorites, even though corroborated by certain musicians and intellectuals of my acquaintance, does not constitute a near-universal rejection such as he has in mind. Nevertheless, it may be worth considering.