Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise

[7/4]

David Ocker on the Rest is Noise.

[7/4]

this page ain't loadin' but is this Alex Ross Asswipe (ARA) still up for discussion? you should see how he dismisses Varese... just for own info, 7/4 , not implying yr on his "side" anything. edc

I don't own a copy!

[7/4]

Since the page doesn't load for Clem, here ya go...

Friday, February 29, 2008

The Rest Is Noise

Here's a before-I-started-reading-it black light picture of "The Rest Is Noise", Alex Ross' excellent history of 20th Century music. The dust jacket is a brilliant white - so pristine. At first I was afraid to touch it for fear of getting it dirty.

But I did. It's a good book about an interesting subject. Read it. Well written, filled with fascinating details, it reveals the often mysterious connections between music and society. The Rest Is Noise is not a book just for musicians. Anyone who's ever wondered why musicians think tritones are important will find it revealing.

THE MUSICAL OCEAN

The Rest Is Noise tells a long story. It gives an impression of twentieth century music as a musical "river". This noisy river carries us from one important composer to the next. Judging by the number of pages given them, Ross has focused our attention on just a few very important composers. [1]

I have no argument with his picks. The Important are all white males. (Duke Ellington squeaks into the top 35 or so.) There is significant over-representation of Jews and gays. They come from (or move to) Germany, France, Russia or New York, although Finland and England each get one. Ross clearly knows (and says several times) that composers come in other colors, genders and nationalities but these mostly get mere mentions.

I do feel that the subtitle "Listening to the 20th Century" is misleading. A book which really covered the entire history of ALL 20th century music would be very different. It would include all the other "rivers", not just the classical one, which drain into the music ocean. At the end of the century some of those other rivers seem more important to me than the classics. [2]

At the end of the century we have easy access to quantities and varieties of music that would have been simply incomprehensible a century ago. Today anyone can develop familiarity with lots of widely different musics. Our new found ability to teleport anywhere in the musical ocean at the click of a iPod is, in my opinion, the most hopeful part of the story of twentieth century music.

I've wondered before (in this post Rich Critic, Poor Critic; look near the end and in the comments) whether the title The Rest Is Noise means to subtly imply that some music is intrinsically better than other music, either overall or just within the classical sphere. Having now read the entire book I still wonder whether that's the intended subtext of this book.

POLITICS OF MUSIC

The way Ross takes a full century filled with curious musical ideas of quirky musicians and ties them into social and political history of the real world is the book's best part.

Politics - whether between waring nations or waring music theories - has had a profound affect on music. Music has never really had any power to cause change (in spite of what Neil Young says [3]). The Rest Is Noise is filled with stories of composers who reinvent themselves and their music following the winds of the political aesthetics or aesthetic politics.

The middle section of The Rest Is Noise very trenchantly devotes a chapter each to the politicizing of music in Soviet Russia, the United States and Nazi Germany during the 1930's and 40's. [4]

The one politician who most influenced the course of twentieth century music was probably Adolph Hitler. He made classical music a weapon of social control in Nazi Germany. [5] After the war the Allies used his weapon to help denazify Germany. [6]

In the 50s a new enemy was agreed upon and the U.S. turned our musical firepower against the Soviets. Secret CIA money funded parts of the European avant-garde during the Cold War. This was supposed to show the rest of the world how the West enjoyed greater freedom. [7] Even later, in the backlash to all that CIA musical ordnance, minimalism took root.

Thanks a lot Adolph. The results of your interest in Wagner operas are still exerting a small effect on musical life today. The story of 20th century music would be a lot different if you had just had the same level of interest as Dubya does now.

Along with politics, Ross often dwells on large scale dramatic works (by which I mean operas; think Salome, Lulu or Peter Grimes). He susses out meaning in the music by deconstructing plot and characters. These are not my personal musical pillars of the century. For me these were the slowest parts of The Rest Is Noise. [8]

HOPING FOR REVISIONISM

Ross's 20th century music narrative breaks down at the end. It's as if the river delta spreads out over so much area that no direction of flow is obvious. This is because we lack the benefit of hindsight. It's not yet certain who will be crowned as the end-of-century classical music heroes. Musical history is filled with forgotten once-famous success stories and deified reanimated living failures. Some contemporary composers will undoubtedly become one or the other.

So, at the end of The Rest Is Noise Ross understandably resorts to musical name dropping, giving us long lists of current well-known composers. I hope he rewrites this ending in about 20 years when there's general agreement over who actually ascends to the pantheon of musical importance. Those are the artists who will force future composers to deal with their own musical issues.

Will those new composer heroes still be white and male? Probably. Will they be exclusively French, German, Russian or New Yorkers? Possibly. Will the story still exclude all other types of music besides the classical tradition. I hope not. But some things, I fear, never change.

Footnotes:

[1] Using a very rough guide (the number of lines - not the number of references - in the index) the top 35 individuals (not all are composers) in The Rest is Noise pantheon are: Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Dimitri Shostakovich, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, Olivier Messiaen/Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler/Sergei Prokofiev, Bela Bartok/Jean Sibelius, Kurt Weill, John Cage/Richard Wagner, Alban Berg/Claude Debussy/George Gershwin, Anton Webern/Paul Hindemith/Pierre Boulez, Charles Ives, Bertolt Brecht/Karlheinz Stockhausen/Leonard Bernstein/Virgil Thompson, Adolf Hitler/Gyorgy Ligeti/Josef Stalin/Morton Feldman/Philip Glass/Steve Reich, Duke Ellington/Leos Janacek/Ludwig van Beethoven/Thomas Mann. (The slash indicates a tie.)

[2] To cover everything it would probably take equally large century-spanning essays on jazz (which has become another "classical" music), rock 'n roll, pop music, world music, music theater and musical technology. By technology I mean all manner of recording gadgets, reproduction formats and distribution schemes, from acoustic recording to 8 tracks to Napster.

[3] Click here to read about Neil Young who recently said "I think that the time when music could change the world is past." That time never happened. Famous musicians can delude themselves into thinking they cause change. In Neil Young's time music didn't change anything - it merely followed as the world changed around it. These days, unfortunately, only capitalism and religion have power to cause real change - and not necessarily for the better (all this is in my opinion, of course).

[4] A fine movie about the clash of politics, music and corporate philanthropy during WPA America is Cradle Will Rock by Tim Robbins.

[5] But Hitler really couldn't control jazz music the way he did classical. See the book Different Drummers, Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany by Michael H. Kater.

[6] Another movie to watch: Taking Sides about a U.S. Army officer who has to decide whether Wilhelm Furtwangler deserves to return to his job conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.

[7] Read Who Paid The Piper, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders which deals with many arts not just music. I personally find this story highly amusing: to discover as an adult that the avant-garde composer heroes of my education and early career, whose work contributed heavily to my own aesthetics, were artificially promoted for dubious political reasons far beyond any possible public acceptance of their actual work. No wonder audiences hate 20th century music - it's all a secret government conspiracy. Ha.

[8] In my own mixed musical manifesto (read it here, scroll down) I suggest that real music doesn't have lyrics. I wonder: could an opera be written which has NO lyrics?

[9] I took the picture of the bust of Henry Cowell in the Stanford music library. Cowell would been in the top 50 if I'd extended the list in footnote 1. The other guy is my absolutely favorite 20th century chamber music composer who didn't get a single mention in The Rest Is Noise.

Read The New Yorker and the Hero Composer In Los Angeles, a previous MM post discussing Alex Ross' New Yorker article about Esa-Pekka Salonen. Click here to read how my picture appeared in Ross' blog The Rest Is Noise.

posted by docker at 10:19 PM

[7/4]

this page ain't loadin' but is this Alex Ross Asswipe (ARA) still up for discussion? you should see how he dismisses Varese... just for own info, 7/4 , not implying yr on his "side" anything. edc

I don't own a copy!

I'll stop by the B&N and look up the bit on Varese this week. I should check to see if the local library (almost next door) has it.

[7/4]

Alex Takes Some Lumps

<h2></h2>

[7/4]

[7/4]

I still haven't read the book. Don't even own a copy.

.

[AllenLowe]

I think we should share Clementine's copy -

[7/4]

Sounds good to me, I don't really want to buy a copy.

.

[Larry Kart]

Finally broke down and got it from the library. Soon (page 5) came across this marvelously representative Ross idiocy: "The heroic narratives of nineteenth-century music, from Beethoven's symphonies to Wagner's music dramas, invariably ended with a blaze of transcendence, of spiritual overcoming. Mahler and Strauss told stories of more circuitous shape, often questioning the possibility of a truly happy outcome."

Yes, the "Ring" has a "truly happy outcome." "Tristan" too. On page 11 Ross himself writes: "The story of the 'Ring' was, in the end, one of hubris and comeuppance: Wotan, the chief of the gods, loses control of his realm and sinks into 'the feeling of powerlessness.'" And then a touch of Ross's pervasive fake-hamisch, upside-down vulgarity: "[Wotan] resembles the head of a great bourgeois family whose livelihood is destroyed by the modernizing forces that he himself has set in motion."

Another gem: "On the train back to Vienna [after the premiere of Strauss's "Salome"], Mahler expressed bewilderment over his colleague's success. He considered 'Salome' a significant and audacious piece .... and could not understand why the public took an immediate liking to it. Genius and popularity were, he apparently thought, incompatible. Traveling in the same carriage was ... poet and novelist Peter Rosegger. According to Alma [Mahler], when Mahler voiced his reservations, Rosegger replied that the the voice of the people is the voice of God -- Vox populi, vox dei. Mahler asked whether he meant the voice of the people at the present moment or the voice of the people over time. Nobody seemed to know the answer to that question." (My emphasis.)

[AllenLowe]

you should do to the book what someone did to one of my daughter's school books - it was some boring novel, and the prior kid wrote, on every few chapter-opening pages, something like, "hey moron you're only up to chapter 6. You got a lot more of this crappy book to read."

[Epithet]

Another gem: "On the train back to Vienna [after the premiere of Strauss's "Salome"], Mahler expressed bewilderment over his colleague's success. He considered 'Salome' a significant and audacious piece .... and could not understand why the public took an immediate liking to it. Genius and popularity were, he apparently thought, incompatible. Traveling in the same carriage was ... poet and novelist Peter Rosegger. According to Alma [Mahler], when Mahler voiced his reservations, Rosegger replied that the the voice of the people is the voice of God -- Vox populi, vox dei. Mahler asked whether he meant the voice of the people at the present moment or the voice of the people over time. Nobody seemed to know the answer to that question." (My emphasis.)

So what's the answer??

[7/4]

Another gem: "On the train back to Vienna [after the premiere of Strauss's "Salome"], Mahler expressed bewilderment over his colleague's success. He considered 'Salome' a significant and audacious piece .... and could not understand why the public took an immediate liking to it. Genius and popularity were, he apparently thought, incompatible. Traveling in the same carriage was ... poet and novelist Peter Rosegger. According to Alma [Mahler], when Mahler voiced his reservations, Rosegger replied that the the voice of the people is the voice of God -- Vox populi, vox dei. Mahler asked whether he meant the voice of the people at the present moment or the voice of the people over time. Nobody seemed to know the answer to that question." (My emphasis.)

So what's the answer??

Nobody seemed to know!

[Larry Kart]

Another gem: "On the train back to Vienna [after the premiere of Strauss's "Salome"], Mahler expressed bewilderment over his colleague's success. He considered 'Salome' a significant and audacious piece .... and could not understand why the public took an immediate liking to it. Genius and popularity were, he apparently thought, incompatible. Traveling in the same carriage was ... poet and novelist Peter Rosegger. According to Alma [Mahler], when Mahler voiced his reservations, Rosegger replied that the the voice of the people is the voice of God -- Vox populi, vox dei. Mahler asked whether he meant the voice of the people at the present moment or the voice of the people over time. Nobody seemed to know the answer to that question." (My emphasis.)

So what's the answer??

Nobody seemed to know!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Ross is selling us a piece of bullshit here. On the one hand, unless a poll were taken of everyone in who happened to be in that railway carriage and overheard Mahler's question, the only somebodies literally present who could have replied were Alma, and Rosegger, assuming that Mahler's question was sincere. That they didn't have an answer means ... what?? On the other hand, that last sentence really exists to create the expectation that Ross himself has or will eventually come up with the answer. To the degree that he does, it seems to be Thomas Ades, John Adams, and Osvaldo Golijov.

Another Ross gem (p. 371):

"In truth, there had always been an element of arbitrariness, of automatism, in atonal and twelve-tone music. When Schoenberg wrote 'Erwartung' in seventeen days, he could hardly have known in advance exactly what each of his nine- and ten-note orchestral chords would sound like; he, too, was throwing paint on canvas."

What possible grounds could Ross have for saying that? If he thinks 'Erwartung' sound arbitrary, he's deaf. And the "seventeen days" thing! That S. wrote certain pieces, especially this one, at a white heat, is well known, but to assume that he must then have been "throwing paint on canvas"? And that "In truth..."!

Finally, from p. 197, about S's "invention" of twelve-tone music in 1923: "In that mad year of hyperinflation, Schoenberg offered a kind of stabilization -- the conversion of a chaotic musical marketplace to a planned economy."

[Epithet]

[...]

So what's the answer??

Nobody seemed to know!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Ross is selling us a piece of bullshit here. On the one hand, unless a poll were taken of everyone in who happened to be in that railway carriage and overheard Mahler's question, the only somebodies literally present who could have replied were Alma, and Rosegger, assuming that Mahler's question was sincere. That they didn't have an answer means ... what?? On the other hand, that last sentence really exists to create the expectation that Ross himself has or will eventually come up with the answer. To the degree that he does, it seems to be Thomas Ades, John Adams, and Osvaldo Golijov.

Hold on. Ross's answer to the question 'Does the poet mean the voice of the people at the present time or over time?' is 'Thomas Ades, John Adams, and Osvaldo Golijov'? Can you give me a semantic bridge to cross here?

Finally, from p. 197, about S's "invention" of twelve-tone music in 1923: "In that mad year of hyperinflation, Schoenberg offered a kind of stabilization -- the conversion of a chaotic musical marketplace to a planned economy."

Well, there was that one guy on Amazon whose one-star reviews of Schoenberg (early or late) likened the whole equality-of-the-tones thing to communism.

Edited March 27, 2008 by Epithet

[Larry Kart]

[...]

So what's the answer??

Nobody seemed to know!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Ross is selling us a piece of bullshit here. On the one hand, unless a poll were taken of everyone in who happened to be in that railway carriage and overheard Mahler's question, the only somebodies literally present who could have replied were Alma, and Rosegger, assuming that Mahler's question was sincere. That they didn't have an answer means ... what?? On the other hand, that last sentence really exists to create the expectation that Ross himself has or will eventually come up with the answer. To the degree that he does, it seems to be Thomas Ades, John Adams, and Osvaldo Golijov.

Hold on. Ross's answer to the question 'Does the poet mean the voice of the people at the present time or over time?' is 'Thomas Ades, John Adams, and Osvaldo Golijov'? Can you give me a semantic bridge to cross here?

Finally, from p. 197, about S's "invention" of twelve-tone music in 1923: "In that mad year of hyperinflation, Schoenberg offered a kind of stabilization -- the conversion of a chaotic musical marketplace to a planned economy."

Well, there was that one guy on Amazon whose one-star reviews of Schoenberg (early or late) likened the whole equality-of-the-tones thing to communism.

Sorry for the shorthand. I meant that Ross's fervent endorsement of the music of those particular contemporary composers means that he thinks that their "answers" to what is really the "Please, God -- is there some kind of modern concert music that good-sized audiences will like, this side of Lowell Leiberman or a string arrangement of Radiohead, 'cause if there isn't, I'm out of a f---ing job here" question are the right answers.

[Epithet]

[...]

Sorry for the shorthand. I meant that Ross's fervent endorsement of the music of those particular contemporary composers means that he thinks that their "answers" to what is really the "Please, God -- is there some kind of modern concert music that good-sized audiences will like, this side of Lowell Leiberman or a string arrangement of Radiohead, 'cause if there isn't, I'm out of a f---ing job here" question are the right answers.

God, how naively I read the original passage.

[Larry Kart]

[...]

Sorry for the shorthand. I meant that Ross's fervent endorsement of the music of those particular contemporary composers means that he thinks that their "answers" to what is really the "Please, God -- is there some kind of modern concert music that good-sized audiences will like, this side of Lowell Leiberman or a string arrangement of Radiohead, 'cause if there isn't, I'm out of a f---ing job here" question are the right answers.

God, how naively I read the original passage.

Ross counts on that.

[rostasi]

His wishes stated about Adorno's books are examples of what you'd like to do to his book.

Soon you'll get to the part where he equates Germans and Austrians.

[clifford_thornton]

And, as a modern art historian, I take issue with "throwing paint on canvas." It ain't that simple, folks...

[7/4]

Started the day with some intriguing wind music:

I've just started reading Alex Ross' 'The Rest is Noise' which has had me listening to an area of music I once gave a lot of time to but seem to have neglected for some years:

Plus a bizarre, almost Dadaesque listen to the Schoenberg second quartet on Spotify where every movement got interrupted by adverts; and a version of Verklarte Nacht tagged on to a Chailly version of Mahler 10.

I like the Ross so far. I know it's had some knocks from the critical establishment but his willingness to not take modernist prophets as seriously as they took themselves suits me just fine. Although there's nothing new in what he's writing about - and its a huge topic squashed into a relatively small space - I'd imagine it would be ideal to fire the curiosity of someone coming new to 20thC classical music. It's certainly making me want to listen again.

I still haven't read it, it covers a lot of familiar territory - but I'm curious. It's a lot cheaper now, than when it first came out!

[AllenLowe]

I guess cheaper means better -

[7/4]

I guess cheaper means better -

No dumb ass, in this case cheaper means it's more affordable for a book I don't consider essential.

.

[AllenLowe]

Some can dish it out, but cannot take it.

[7/4]

Some can dish it out, but cannot take it.