Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise

[Bol]

Judging from checking out some pages, this book looks very good. Has anyone read it?

[7/4]

I'll get to it eventually, maybe next time I'm in NYC I'll stop at the Strand and see if I can find a cheap copy. I wonder what Clem thinks of it.

[WD45]

My co-worker bought it, and it is in my Amazon wish list. I have been a fan of Ross's for a while -- his blog is worth digging too.

[T.D.]

I've read a lot of Ross's writing on modern classical music. Generally find it uninteresting, often dislike it, but there are occasional good articles. I'd only purchase his book at a very low price; might peruse it via library. I look at his blog occasionally, and am rarely impressed. I agree that Ross's reputation is inflated by the "exalted" institutions in which is writing appears. OTOH, I don't know of any recommendable general books on modern classical.

[7/4]

http://www.kottke.org/07/10/the-rest-is-noise

[Tom Storer]

(i wish i could speak more of the Ratliff <---> Coltrane

Why can't you?

[7/4]

(i wish i could speak more of the Ratliff <---> Coltrane

Why can't you?

Maybe he's saying he doesn't think much of it and doesn't have anything to add to the discussion.

[Bol]

http://www.kottke.org/07/10/the-rest-is-noise

Thanks for that. I for one enjoy Ross's writings. He's quite informal in the best way -- kinda like Kevin Whitehead. And I like the low cringe quotient in his writings compared to other cultural critics.

[7/4]

http://www.therestisnoise.com/

[7/4]

reviews.

[clifford_thornton]

http://www.kottke.org/07/10/the-rest-is-noise

Thanks for that. I for one enjoy Ross's writings. He's quite informal in the best way -- kinda like Kevin Whitehead. And I like the low cringe quotient in his writings compared to other cultural critics.

I've thrown New Dutch Swing at the wall more than twice...

[Chuck Nessa]

http://www.kottke.org/07/10/the-rest-is-noise

Thanks for that. I for one enjoy Ross's writings. He's quite informal in the best way -- kinda like Kevin Whitehead. And I like the low cringe quotient in his writings compared to other cultural critics.

I've thrown New Dutch Swing at the wall more than twice...

It bounced back, didn't it?

[Chuck Nessa]

FWIW, I'm now awaiting the Kansas jazz tome from KW.

[clifford_thornton]

That should be an interesting read.

I just got irritated with the previous tome. It didn't spend enough time with non-ICP Dutch jazz at all, and some of the "conversational" writing seemed too "hip" for its own good.

[Bol]

That should be an interesting read.

I just got irritated with the previous tome. It didn't spend enough time with non-ICP Dutch jazz at all, and some of the "conversational" writing seemed too "hip" for its own good.

I agree with you that Whitehead overdoes the "hip" writing now and then. But on the whole, he seems to be quite incisive about the music he likes -- more so than, say, people like Giddins and the guy who wrote that really boring book on the West Coast Jazz whose name I forget. I've used Whitehead's book to explore the Dutch music, and while I did not agree with him all the time, I built up a lot of trust in his judgments. And I do not mind that he is not comprehensive. I think these writers have the right to just cover what they like best. Nothing more boring than writers who try to be comprehensive for the sake of being comprehensive. And his reviews for Fresh Air are fun and to-the-point.

[AllenLowe]

funny about Dupree Bolton - I was in San Francisco in Chinatown, I don'r remember the year, probably the middle 1980s - my wife comes up to me and says, you should hear this guy playing trumpet on the corner over there, he sounds good; I go over, and there's clearly something a little different about this guy, a sound and phrasing that makes him not just another street performer. Well, I go up to him, ask him his name - and it's Dupree Bolton! I almost fell over, he was very pleased that I knew who he was, we talked, he was basically a street-guy and a a junkie, very nice but very sadly deteriorated. I think a few other people ran into him in this way as well - and I know he has since died -

Edited October 26, 2007 by AllenLowe

[7/4]

October 28, 2007

The Music Issue

Century’s Playlist

By GEOFF DYER, NY Times

THE REST IS NOISE

Listening to the Twentieth Century.

By Alex Ross.

Illustrated. 624 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

Does the very thing that qualifies someone to write a review — the fact that he is the kind of reader to whom the book is “especially” addressed — disqualify him from doing so? I ask not as one “well versed in classical music” but as a representative of “those who feel passing curiosity about this obscure pandemonium on the outskirts of culture.” Those better versed may be able to pounce on Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, if he gets things wrong — if he mistakenly claims the music goes from a D major to a D minor or whatever — but my ignorance of musical technicalities means that I pose a special and more profound test of Ross’s skills. When he’s treating an invalid (pronounce the word however seems appropriate) like me, he will have to proceed like a therapist faced with a physical inadequacy that can’t, of itself, be fixed. His prose is going to have to work on the surrounding muscle to compensate for a more deep-seated weakness. If he does this — if he succeeds in articulating what my ears have been ignorantly hearing — then he will have produced a thoroughly invigorating program of rehabilitation.

“The Rest Is Noise” is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music. We start with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, “the titans of Austro-German music” in Graz, on May 16, 1906. Strauss is there to conduct a performance of his opera “Salome.” It turns into an extraordinary night — not because of the shrieks, discords and howls of the music but because, to Mahler’s astonishment, the audience loves it.

This may have been “just one event in a busy season, but, like a flash of lightning, it illuminated a musical world on the verge of traumatic change. Past and future were colliding; centuries were passing in the night.” Vividly actualized, extensively and astutely analyzed, the episode also serves as a model for the book as a whole. Time and again Ross finds an event that expresses a larger movement — a person or a scene in which tendencies and meaning converge. In Paris, Claude Debussy and Erik Satie stand for a “stripped-down, folk-based, jazz-happy” avant-garde, while in Vienna Arnold Schoenberg and his 12-tone progeny, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, illuminate “the terrible depths with their holy torches.”

From Stravinsky to Sibelius to Schoenberg (who “learned instrumental forms by subscribing to an encyclopedia, and waited for the S volume to arrive before composing a sonata”), the emerging heavyweights of the new music are sketched with a brevity and confidence that are the products, surely, of deep immersion and study. Steeped though Ross is in Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann, his own style is mercifully free of the “implacable imperative of density” commended by the critic-devil in Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” (a novel that provides a framing parable for the book’s early sections).

Nevertheless, with so much ground to cover, after 150 pages one fears that “The Rest” may subside into a linked series of adroitly composed New Yorkerish profiles. Fortunately, just as things begin to sag, totalitarianism comes to the rescue. As Ross examines the compromised fate of composers under Stalin and Hitler, the book again rises to embrace its darker purpose. Inevitably Dmitri Shostakovich is the emblematically contorted figure, moving from derisory laughter at the very idea of having to explain “the socioeconomic dimensions of the music of Chopin and Liszt” to an uncomfortable accommodation with the state that both facilitates and threatens his work.

In post-Wagnerian Germany, meanwhile, could something ominous be heard looming in all those “humongous Teutonic symphonies”? Conceding from the outset that “no composer more painfully exhibited the moral collapse of German art than Richard Strauss,” Ross probes the composer’s complex, often contradictory relation to the Nazi regime with considerable dexterity. This is where the debate at the conceptual heart of Ross’s undertaking is thrown into sharpest focus: is the history of music self-contained or can a larger, extramusical history be distilled from it? Actually, as Ross makes clear, the alternatives are mutually implicated and imbricated: “precisely because of its inarticulate nature,” music is “all too easily imprinted with ideologies and deployed to political ends.”

With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, “The Rest Is Noise” is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement. So much so that at times history itself seems bent on playing into Ross’s hands. Who could have imagined that, as a “surreal” consequence of the rise of fascism, many of the giants of European classical music — Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov and Otto Klemperer (to say nothing of Mann and Adorno) — would end up living on each others’ doorsteps in Los Angeles? In such proximity, events of world-historical importance offered an irresistible incentive to pettiness. When NBC broadcast Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony in 1942, most of the émigré composers “experienced a mass attack of envy and resentment.”

Schoenberg and Stravinsky both did their best to squeeze huge fees from sympathetic Hollywood studios. Thereafter, scoring music for films became one of the principal ways in which new orchestral music maintained a viable position in the cultural marketplace. And while America produced both homegrown composers of “straight music” (to use the jazzer’s preferred term) and composers of popular music deserving classic status — Ellington, Gershwin, Bernstein — many of the most challenging ideas of the avant-garde were disseminated through jazz (often regarded as “black classical music”).

This means that, in the postwar years, Ross’s catchment area has to be extended still further. Inevitably, as we draw closer to the present, the quantity and range of material make it difficult for the book to sustain the concentration achieved mid-century. The fragmentation of the musical center means that the story becomes dispersed, and we are urged, irresistibly, toward the cultural edges. With its obligation to touch on everyone — Terry Riley, Alfred Schnittke, Thomas Adès — the book begins to resemble a reference work in narrative guise. I don’t see how it could have been done differently, but the centrifugal force generated by the obligation to be comprehensive also causes a distortion of emphasis. Perhaps the problem rests on the necessary if unsustainable distinction between improvisation and composition. John Coltrane is mentioned, but relatively speaking, his importance here seems to derive from the way Steve Reich saw him play a bunch of times. Keith Jarrett does not get a look in, even though his improvised solo piano concerts in some ways represent the culmination of virtuoso classical performance stretching back to Liszt.

It would be unfair, though, to dwell on omissions when so much has been included. “The Rest Is Noise” is a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand “more seeingly” in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.

[Guy Berger]

Here is The Economist's review:

Twentieth-century music

Music, war and politics intertwined

Oct 25th 2007

From The Economist print edition

The turbulent years of the 20th century, as seen through its music

RIA Novosti

WHEN Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue” had its première in 1924, at a concert in New York that was billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music”, the audience included Rachmaninov and other big names from the classical world. By all accounts, the experiment was a success. It established that jazz could be worthy of the concert hall. Four years later in Europe, Gershwin met more of his new admirers, including Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev and two composers of the revolutionary Second Viennese School, Schoenberg and Berg. Awed by Berg, Gershwin hesitated at the piano one night, nervous about playing his catchy songs before one of the deconstructors of conventional harmony. Berg sternly encouraged him: “Mr Gershwin, music is music.”

If only it were that simple, writes Alex Ross, the New Yorker's music critic, in his history of music in the 20th century. He notes that musical life in the past 100 years has “disintegrated into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon.” The cultures may sometimes meet on affable terms, but the results can be comic in their incongruity. In the 1930s, when much of the European artistic elite was holed up in Hollywood, Fanny Brice, a comedienne, strolled over to Schoenberg at a dinner given by Harpo Marx: “C'mon, professor, play us a tune.”

It would be hard to imagine a better guide to the maelstrom of recent music than Mr Ross, who worked on this book for a decade. He has an almost uncanny gift for putting music into words. No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording. And his reporter's nose and exhaustive research result in more telling vignettes and notable anecdotes per chapter than any reader has a right to expect.

Mr Ross notices that Gustav Mahler, who came from a Jewish background, was at the podium when Adolf Hitler saw Wagner's “Tristan and Isolde” in Vienna on May 8th 1906, an experience that prompted Hitler to decide to study opera direction and painting in Vienna. (Unfortunately, that career-plan did not work out.) He notices that some photographs of Hitler's oratorical poses show a suggestive resemblance to Mahler's conducting style. And he notices that a prisoners' orchestra that played for SS officers in Auschwitz in 1942, and captivated Josef Mengele, was led by Mahler's niece, Alma Rosé, who died in the concentration camp.

War and politics visibly intertwined with music in the 20th century, under totalitarianism and after it. As Mr Ross documents, classical music blared constantly in the choreographed background to Nazi life. For a time, the classical repertoire was deemed to have lost its moral stature because of the Nazis' embrace. This was one reason why some composers tried to scrap classical forms and explore the alternatives, leading to the dissonant pandemonium of experimental music in the 1950s. Theodor Adorno, a left-wing sociologist and musician, wrote in 1949 that preserving tonality betrayed a fascist mentality.

Under Stalin, Soviet art was rigorously policed to ensure that it reflected Soviet ideology. Shostakovich was accused of “formalism”: Soviet-speak for any style that seemed too close to Western modernism. He was one of the few censured Soviet artists to survive the purges.

Post-war democracy had its (less pernicious) musical agenda, too. The psychological-warfare unit of America's occupation government in Germany and Austria worked to minimise the influence of tainted composers, such as Richard Strauss, who had unwisely thanked God when Hitler came to power: “Finally, a Reich chancellor who is interested in art!”

Sibelius's “Finlandia” was banned, in case it rekindled feelings of Nordic supremacy. American music, such as the work of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, was encouraged. In the early 1960s, when America wanted to show that capitalism and high culture were compatible, music became a weapon in the cold war. As Mr Ross puts it, the arms race expanded into a science race and then a culture race. Much of the impetus for the millions of dollars spent on cultural infrastructure came from the Kennedy administration—although Jacqueline Kennedy once quipped that the only music that the president really liked was “Hail to the Chief”.

Mr Ross says that his aim is to provide a history of the 20th century through its music, not just a history of the music itself. In this he succeeds magnificently, at least for classical music and its closest cousins. Yet, as he knows, a large part of the story of the past century belongs to pop and rock, which get only walk-on parts here, albeit excellently drawn ones. He is especially adept at describing the cross-fertilisation of genres—how classical minimalism affected popular music through such intermediaries as Lou Reed and Brian Eno, for example.

There are tantalising hints that he has much to say about the classical-popular divide. Classical composers, he writes, are now looking for the place between the life of the mind and the noise of the street. They may never match the instant impact of pop, but “in the freedom of their solitude, they can communicate experiences of singular intensity.” If only he would tell us more. This is not a complaint, but a request for an encore.

Edited November 12, 2007 by Guy

[Larry Kart]

Indeed, Mr. Ross is in the "tantalizing hints" business.

[Larry Kart]

edc doesn't mean this as any implied criticism but don't some of ya'll, re: Ross & Ratliff, consider it just slightly curious that these books are being near-ubiquitously reviewed & Organissimo's own Larry Kart's contribution to the music writing shelves was... not? A book is a book is a book, right? I daresay too that, although a collection of previously published pieces, LK offered more original thought/words than both these clowns combined. Even given editorial biases against anthologies, the HUGE disparity between attentions given is more than a little... again, the word is curious. (Larry's lost volume is far from the only example in any genre, including contemporary fiction, but too many people act like exposure, under & over, isn't a factor in the dialogue as presented.)

Not to bore y'all, as EDC might put it, but I don't think of my book is being that lost. It got about seven or eight reviews, maybe more, every one was favorable, and several who wrote about it got exactly what I was trying to say. Also, it got into the hands of a fair number of people here, and their responses were everything I could have wished for. OTOH, I think EDC is talking more about the machinery of exposure/reception, and there he has a point. Dealing with Ratliff and Ross's books seems to be obligatory on the part of many major publications, in part (perhaps mostly) because Ratliff and Ross themselves write for major publications (the best review I got -- most favorable and most insightful -- was from a new name to me at the time, Stephen Schwartz, who wrote it for a classical website whose name I don't recall). But, then, if my book was as nice as I hoped it might be, I still think I came out ahead in the exposure/reception game, because if Ratliff and Ross's books are as empty as some of us think they are, it doesn't matter if they're reviewed all over the place and sell a fair number of copies -- except in terms of money (and I'll bet it won't be that much money for those two authors or their publishers; you'll probably see both books on remainder tables by next year) and the noise level inside the echo chamber in which Ratliff and Ross already exist. But if I've made, say, Jim Sangrey or EDC or -- fill in the blank -- think a thought that they otherwise might not have thought and that they then find interesting/stimulating, what more do I want? It should all be carved in cuneiform on stone tablets and buried in the sacred tomb of Ra?

[Larry Kart]

BTW, I'm not trying to come on like an Ivory Tower elitist here. I know from experience what it's like to write something honest and would-be clever that is read the next morning by, potentially, 800,000 people, and that sometimes -- by accident (usually of given subject matter) as much as design -- is noticed by a fair number of those potential readers, who then make it quite clear that what you wrote got them het up one way or another. That can be both fun and fairly weird and is at odd times arguably even valuable, but there's no way to talk about jazz since maybe the heyday of Leonard Feather that's even remotely comparable -- and if you're going to talk about it honestly, then your potential audience is even smaller. But it's still fun and (in the eyes of some) necessary to do, and, if you and others value it, valuable.

[Lazaro Vega]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...23/AR2007112300

487.html

Outside the Boxes: A History of Modern Music That Does Not Respect

Convention

By Stephen Walsh

Professor of music at Cardiff University, Wales, a music critic for the

London Independent and author of a two-volume biography of Stravinsky

Sunday, November 25, 2007; M04

THE REST IS NOISE

Listening to the Twentieth Century

By Alex Ross

Farrar Straus Giroux. 624 Pp. $30.

The shelves of music libraries groan under the accumulation of histories of

20th-century music. But they are a dispiriting collection, partly because

their implicit claim -- even if they dodge the actual term -- to be

"history" is obvious nonsense. How can you write a history of something that

is still going on?

The answer has usually been to stick to a set of preordained categories,

often decreed by composers or academics, with unappealing titles like

modernism, neoclassicism, serialism, etc., and let anything and anyone that

doesn't fit them (jazz, Sibelius, Gershwin, film music) go hang. Happily,

Alex Ross, who writes about music for the New Yorker and maintains one of

the best-informed music blogs on the Web, has avoided this trap. The most

striking thing about "The Rest Is Noise" is its refusal to conform to the

standard headings and judgments beloved of historians of modern music and

its energetic mixing of technical, stylistic and even chronological

categories.

Ross clearly realizes that music doesn't evolve in rigid boxes. And there's

no doubt that pigeonholing has been the evil genius of the music of the last

century. It was pigeonholing that produced Arnold Schoenberg's repetitive or

"serial" technique -- which he famously claimed would prolong German musical

supremacy for 100 years. It was pigeonholing that temporarily sidelined

Strauss, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius and others (because they didn't go serial or

atonal). And it was pigeonholing that gave birth to the politicization of

musical styles in postwar Europe (Pierre Boulez announcing that non-serial

composers were "useless") and America, where the left-leaning Aaron Copland

went populist in such works as "Billy the Kid" and "Rodeo," and after the

war was investigated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy for his pains.

All along, of course, this restrictive impulse has given us jazz, pop, world

music, classical and all the other entrenched categories of the Google age,

to the paradoxical point where "music" now means anything but Bach,

Beethoven, Brahms, Bartok and company (which is probably why Ross has

carefully excluded the word from his title).

"The Rest Is Noise" explores all these various boxes and -isms in an

evenhanded and approachable way, with the absence of dogmatism that is the

mark of a true enthusiast. The conventional picture of so-called modern

music, in which various figures of admitted stature gradually drop off the

train of progress as it proceeds on its not particularly merry way, is

quietly abandoned in favor of something closer to what happens in an actual

station -- a constant, unpredictable to and fro of people and incident,

unexpected meetings, conversation and argument, pushing and shoving: a sort

of perpetual postmodernism (another word that, significantly, Ross does not

use).

I exaggerate, of course. No history can wholly avoid categories. But Ross's

starting point is novel all the same. In Paul Griffiths's "Concise History

of Modern Music" (1978), modern music begins with the delicious flute solo

that opens Claude Debussy's "Pr¿lude ¿ l'apr¿s-midi d'un faune" (1894),

just as for Griffiths the theories of Boulez (who first touted the idea of

Debussy as founding father of modernism) are the key to music since World

War II. But Ross makes light, not to say fun, of the "pseudoscientific

mentality" of the Darmstadt summer schools in Germany, where Boulez and

Karlheinz Stockhausen held court in the early '50s, "researching" ever more

cerebral ways of writing music. Instead of Debussy, he opens 20th-century

music with the Austrian premiere in Graz in 1906 of Richard Strauss's

"Salome," a work subsequently admired for its daring and also hated for its

vulgarity.

>From there Ross tracks through the next 100 years with a strong eye to

cultural and political, as well as aesthetic, currents. After "Salome" he

passes logically to the disintegration of traditional tonality in Debussy

and Schoenberg (a pair not commonly wedded), a chapter that links the

violent folksiness of Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" with '20s jazz,

another on the line of American music from the experimentalist Charles Ives

to the jazz master Duke Ellington, and a whole chapter on Jean Sibelius, a

composer routinely despised by right-thinking modernists but treated here as

a radical who happened to prefer a transparent tonal language at a time when

atonality was the essential style in progressive circles. Later, a chunk of

the book is devoted to the politics of music before, during and after World

War II in Russia, Germany and -- not much less chilling -- the United

States. Finally, a brilliantly eclectic study of music since the war

debouches in a survey of bebop, rock and minimalism, provocatively titled

(after John Cage) "Beethoven Was Wrong."

Thus Ross declines to approve any of the doctrinaire positions of a century

riven by battles of style and system. He discounts nothing on principle. So

Stockhausen is here, but so are Benjamin Britten and bebop, Miles Davis as

well as Olivier Messiaen. Behind all this, I suspect, is a reluctance to see

the history of something whose outcomes are as yet unclear in any but an

objective light. But, equally, the approach is fed by taste, experience and,

to some extent, locale. As a New York critic, Ross is in a strong position

to sample and assess every kind of music; at the same time there is an

automatic American bias that is no doubt more apparent to a European like

me. So such composers as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Henri

Dutilleux, Hans Werner Henze and one or two others who might be expected to

figure in a revisionist history of the last century are more or less ignored

in favor of Americans such as Virgil Thomson and Carl Ruggles, who, from

this side of the ocean, may now seem irretrievably minor.

Ross is not scoring parochial points. He's writing a history whose American

focus becomes more significant the more one inclines to ridicule the

aesthetic infighting that has plagued European music since the last world

war. After all, the intellectual gridlock in France and Germany was loosened

by Cage and broken finally by American minimalists such as Steve Reich,

Terry Riley and Philip Glass. Whatever one thinks of these composers' music,

its contemporary influence is impossible to deny, its future significance an

open book which, to his credit, Ross doesn't attempt to close.

This is the best general study of a complex history too often claimed by

academic specialists on the one hand and candid populists on the other. Ross

plows his own broad furrow, beholden to neither side, drawing on both. It's

an impressive, invigorating achievement.

--

[Joe G]

So, what is "the rest" ?

[Joe G]

Laz deleted his day-old response. Was it the wrong answer?

[AllenLowe]

I'll skip the Ruggles and take the Muggles -