User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
You know how you can watch a foreign language movie, without subtitles, and still enjoy the film? You may not speak German but can still tell that Hitler's pissed off. You may not speak French, but you can tell that Juliette Binoche has reached a point of existential doubt in a meretricious relationship.
This book was like that for me. I may not, even now, be able to articulate a difference between atonality and twelve-tone music (is there one?), but I love being told that "some stabbing single notes" in a second movement are like "a knife in Stalin's heart."
This book is Music in the Twentieth Century. Or, the Twentieth Century, with music.
"Crescendo" "più forte" "Silence". It starts with Richard Strauss conducting
Salome. Puccini took the train north; Mahler
et ux attended. Schoenberg and Berg were there. Hitler said he was. And if you recall:
There was even a fictional character present--Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus
, the tale of a composer in league with the devil.Leverkühn looms large in this history, a twisting of Evil with Music, and a twisting of Music and the human soul. The notes I heard kept asking "What's next?" and "What's next?" In slow movements, and fast.
There's some tabloid stuff here: that Alma Mahler, what a tart; that Pierre Boulez, what a jerk. But it's also a Music Appreciation course, and Alex Ross clearly knows his material. He attempts to make this inter-active by offering a website - www.therestisnoise.com - with click-and-play excerpts. I found that cumbersome and chose my own inter-activity, playing music from my collection or youtubing. I'll annoy you in a bit with some links.
Ross has an ear for humor too:
The joke went around that Webern had introduced the marking pensato
: Don't play the note, only think it.I didn't always hear what Ross heard. There's Sibelius in Barber? But then he didn't hear Gorecki in Barber; or didn't say so. That's part of the fun.
Let me break into some dissonant chords now and give you fragments from the book, things I learned.
-- Sibelius remains a big deal in his native land; his face was on every coin until Finland converted to the Euro. The annual Finnish expenditure on the arts is roughly 200 times per capita what the United States spends on the National Endowment of the Arts. I'm not saying that's wrong; just sayin'.
-- Ruth Crawford Seeger was Pete Seeger's stepmother. She created some (to my ears) really interesting avant garde music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqz9C... . She stopped composing when her Communist husband, a formulator of "dissonant counterpoint", told her "women can't compose symphonies." Oh, Artemisia.
-- Perhaps I would have understood Josef Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls better if I knew that it was Stalin who once mused that writers should be "engineers of human souls."
-- Musical luminaries descended on Paris in 1952 for the Masterpieces of the XXth Century festival. It was thought to be funded by Julius Fleischmann, the yeast-and-gin millionaire. In reality, the whole event was financed by the CIA.
There is a bit of The Emperor's New Clothes to the excesses of art, music included. A century that started with Strauss, Mahler and Sibelius ended with:
-- John Cage's
4'33":
The original score was written out on conventional music paper, tempo + 60, in three movements. David Tudor walked onstage, sat down at the piano, opened the piano lid, and did nothing, except to close the lid and open it again at the beginning of each subsequent movement. The music was the sound of the surrounding space. ... It was a piece that anyone could have written, as skeptics never failed to point out, but, as Cage seldom failed to respond, no one else did.-- Luigi Nono's signature piece,
Il canto sospeso, took texts from anti-Fascist resistance fighters - "I am not afraid of death," "I will be calm and at peace facing the execution squad," "I go in the belief of a better life for you" - and broke them into syllables which he scattered throughout the various choral parts. By making the words less accessible, he believed, they would matter more.
-- David Tudor, attacking a piano with boxing gloves.
-- Dieter Schnebel, who in his work
Abfälle I,1 invited audience members to contribute to the performance by conversing, making noises of approval or disapproval, coughing, and moving chairs.
-- And Alvin Lucier, who in
Music for Solo Performer attached electrodes to his head and broadcast his brain's alpha waves to loudspeakers around the room, the low-frequency tones causing nearby percussion instruments to vibrate.
I'm not kidding.
And yet, Ross opened up much of the "new" music to me. This was sometimes accomplished just by my own perusal of works by a composer that Ross mentions. Henry Cowell, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLkg-.... Yes, elbows. Some of Cowell's pieces are all
inside the piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3CPr....
Delightfully, there are composers I'd never heard of who intrigued, after some exploration. Ross notes six "significant voices" in contemporary music:
-- Franghiz Ali-Zadeh of Azerbaijan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nevnq...
-- Chen Yi of China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVFZL...
-- Unsuk Chin of South Korea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vqiq...
-- Sofia Gubaidulina of Russia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37e3p...
-- Kaija Saariaho of Finland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkmzX...
-- Pauline Oliveros of the United States: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rdnX...
Too late for Ruth Crawford Seeger, or Artemisia for that matter, but all six are women.
The Twentieth Century. You may think of Rothko paintings. Think of a musical piece written by Morton Feldman, mourning his friend's death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wHuh....
The Twentieth Century. When classical music takes a drug and goes Rock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffr0o.... That's right. Take a walk on the wild side.
The Twentieth Century. I'll let Steve Goodman sing us out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ_3w...
Rating: really liked it
I think this book is best read and listened to at the same time; it really adds to it. As such, I created a Youtube playlist to go along with your read, which you can find here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=...
If you're looking for a listen with better sound quality and don't mind finding them yourselves (I can't blame you), then here is the list of songs that I thought captured the book:
Richard Strauss – Also Sprach Zarathustra
Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 8
Claude Debussy – Arabesque I
Claude Debussy – Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Arnold Schoenberg – Verklärte Nacht
Anton Webern – Six Pieces for Orchestra
Igor Stravinsky – Rite of Spring
Darius Milhaud – Scaramouche
Will Marion Cook – Swing Along!
Charles Ives – The Unanswered Question
George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue
Jean Sibelius – Symphony No. 2
Paul Hindemith - Sonate per viola e pianoforte
Louis Armstrong – Mack the Knife
Arnold Schoenberg – Jakobsleiter
Alban Berg – Lulu Suite
Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony No. 5
Aaron Copland – Appalachian Spring
John Cage – Music of Changes
Karlheinz Stockhausen – Telemusik
Benjamin Britten – Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes”
Olivier Messiaen – Quartet for the End of Time
Morton Feldman – Rothko Chapel
John Adams – Common Tones in Simple Time
Rating: really liked it
This book could be subtitled: ‘Musicians who did stuff after Wagner, with wildly varied results’. Wagner hovers like a ghost over this work, the Great Father whose achievements couldn’t be surpassed in toto, only in miniature via crazier and crazier endeavours.
The composers range from deep genius (Debussy, Sibelius) to sterile fapping (too many to name), but whether one loves or hates their music is irrelevant as this is primarily a work of social history.
The author describes ‘classical’ music in the 2000s as a ‘sunken cathedral’, i.e. an interregnum, and who knows what comes next.
Rating: really liked it
This book took me way too long to read, which is a little strange because I found it very interesting and quite inspiring. I'm tempted to give it five stars, but I'm too much of a dilettante when it comes to cough,
serious music to not necessarily take everything that the author is saying at face value. I do have two complaints about the books though, the first is that the author clearly dislikes the one of the few people I probably do count as an actual hero of mine. I don't hold it strongly against him that he finds Adorno to (what's the word), not necessarily wrong, but some kind of extremist snob for lack of a better word. Every time Adorno makes an appearance on these pages he comes across like a rapid attack dog of anti-everything except for strict Schoenberg non-mass appeal. Which might be true, I've never really delved into his music writings too deeply, but the picture of him as an
enfant terrible is I like a bit of a cartoonish exaggeration.
The second complaint I would have of the book is that it kind of stops short of being a history of 20th century music and kind of peters out around 1976 with Reich's
Music for 18 Musicians. A few other composers are talked about and works that they release in the same year, but all talk of the last quarter of the century is treated in a very fragmentary and stilted manner. Maybe there isn't much to talk about, but the style of the book changes in the last fifty pages or so in a way that makes the very end of the book read like a series of notes the author made on a handful of composers and records. In this last section there are also name droppings of pop artists like Radiohead, Sonic Youth and Bjork, which pulls together the history of serious music with pop music, but without doing much more than dropping the names in the swirl of the kind of chaotic finish.
The author also uses the phrase 'moshpit of the mind' which is almost totally inexcusable in the context it's given in, and actually shouldn't be used by anyone. It's moments like that which seem to make the author trying to hard to sound hip, but there isn't anything hip about using the word moshpit, and really the only people who would ever say something like that are someone's dad who heard the word and thinks it's what with it people are saying. I can't hold this against the author too strongly though.
All in all I really enjoyed this book, and it's treatment of pre-World War 2 music especially in Germany was very informative to me. I have a feeling that anyone seriously into modern music will find the book to be missing some of their favorites, or think the book treats certain movements too quickly, but as a general overview of a chaotic century's musical trends this book seems to do it's job just fine.
Rating: really liked it
Who says history is boring? And who says classical music died with Wagner? Well I have actually always liked history but was largely unfamiliar with 20c classical music until I read Ross' excellent The Rest is Noise. Alex Ross does an amazing job of writing the history of the 20c in classical music starting at the waning but overwhelming influence of Wagner on early 20c composers like Schoenberg and Stravinsky through the onset of atonal music and on through the wars and the crazy 60's. I had NO idea that classical music was so incredibly rich and interesting particularly in the previous century. I don't want to spoil anything here because it is incredibly readable and you will learn on nearly every page. I am still trying to get through all the recordings that he posted on his book's website (http://www.therestisnoise.com) which could serve as a fore-taste of how great this book is. Don't walk but run to amazon and grab a copy. I liked it so much that I bought the sequel Listen to This...happy reading.
Rating: really liked it
This isn't something I say lightly, but pretty much everyone should consider reading Alex Ross'
The Rest Is Noise.* Why? Because (a) it makes for a riveting work of political and cultural history, and (b) it provides a layman's entry point into that most venerable of Western art forms—classical music.
I first became acquainted with this book in my late teens. By that time, I'd already immersed myself quite heavily in free jazz, noise, and the like. But classical music—especially the 20th century variety—had thus far eluded my understanding. Like many otherwise adventurous young listeners, I felt overwhelmed by the plethora of composers, performers and recordings to choose from. And in this regard, avant-jazz was—comparatively speaking—pretty straightforward: all you needed to do was track yourself down a copy of
Interstellar Space or
Free Jazz or
Spiritual Unity. With composed music, the problem was knowing where the hell you should even start.
Enter
The Rest Is Noise. Over the course of fifteen chapters, which trace the development of modern classical from Strauss and Mahler up until the present age, Ross examines the seminal musical works of the 20th century, as well as the social and political contexts that birthed them. It's all terribly fascinating stuff. But history only makes up one side of the coin, and the book concludes with a list of recommended recordings (a more comprehensive list may be found on Ross' website) to guide the inexperienced listener through the disorienting terrain of aural source material.
Yet this book doesn't only tell you
what to listen to; it also teaches you
how to listen. Gifted with an arresting propensity for translating sounds into words, Ross occasionally devotes a few pages to a single piece of music, explaining how a particular snare drum pattern in a Shostakovich symphony, say, might function as a subtle critique of authoritarianism, or how the retrograde rhythms in a Messiaen chamber work serve to hinder the audience's perception of time. And by means of these descriptions, Ross deftly inculcates the art of
deep listening, of knowing how to successfully parse a swirling miasma of tones, textures and timbres.
In short,
The Rest Is Noise is an effective gateway drug into the wild and mystifying world of 20th century classical music. And so I say, "
Bravo, bravo!," as I rise for a standing ovation.
(P.S. If anyone would like some classical recommendations, shoot me a message and I'd be more than happy to oblige!)
* Save for perhaps the illiterate and the hopelessly tone-deaf.
Rating: really liked it
Alex Ross is one of my must-read
New Yorker writers. Whenever a new piece of his comes out I know I'm going to be smarter than I was before. To me, he is
the music critic.
The Rest Is Noise is often referred to as
the book on 20th century classical music. And I can only further perpetrate that sentiment.
Rating: really liked it
This book is made so much more enjoyable because of the Internet--one of the few books you can say that about--because of the availability of samples of the music on the book's web site. I enjoyed the first chapters best because the author allowed me to imagine what a momentous event it must have been, in an age before recorded music, to be in the audience when a composer's music first premiered.
Rating: really liked it
alex ross is one of the few remaining music critics for a major american periodical (there used to be many more, but it's a dwindling profession/art), in his case,
the new yorker. he attends a concert more than once if possible, with the score and without, in order to both understand the music
and feel it. and he's young, so his ears aren't burdened with decades of ear wax, "received wisdom," archaic prejudice, etc.
how rare is it to ever find anyone who can
write about music!? (an impossible challenge on the face of it, if one is going to say anything more than technical
data like, "... the dotted sixteenths in bar25 mirror the attenuated chromatic intonation ..." etc etc)
his grasp of the material is sure; his writing is tonic, refreshing; his insights are sharp; his tone, fresh. he's on the dime.
he's been working on this book for some time and finally it's out. (there are a few inevitable repetitions here and there, in stitching the whole thing together, but — hey!)
hands-down, THE best book on 20th-century Western music you'll ever find in THIS one.
AND you can enhance your reading by visiting his website, where he's posted representative selections, for each chapter, as well as his always lively blog
hear, here!
Rating: really liked it
Alex Ross' wonderful trip to the 20th Century via the world of classical music and it's composers. As I mentioned I had very little knowledge of classical music - especially modern. I knew Glass, Reich, Satie, but overall this is pretty much a new world music wise.
Saying that this is also the history of cultural life in the 20th Century. The best chapeters deal with Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia and how they used music -and how it affected the composers of that place and time.
In a distant way the book reminds me of "The City of Nets" in that there are many stories being told - because some of them are real characters - but also for me there were some dry areas. Not sure because of the text or the writer's focus, or maybe it's just the subject matter. But overall I think this book is pretty essential in not only music history but also how music interacts with society/culture of that time. Ross is really good at giving the big picture.
Rating: really liked it
This is hands down the best book I have read about music. Alex Ross writes about composers, their relationship with each other, and how they survive the culture swirling around them, in a way that really captured me, and I work with music for a living. It took me a long time to read because I felt obligated to listen to all the pieces he referenced.
Worth reading no matter how familiar you are with classical music. It is practically a history of the 20th century shown through the music of its classical composers.
"The fabric of harmony was warping, as if under the influence of an unseen force." - about Liszt
"A fenced-off soul is opening itself to the chaos of the outer world." - Bartok
"I don't believe I will ever experience a more profound and stranger emotion than this sort of mute terror." - Ravel
"The birth of art will take place [when:] the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone forever." - Charles Ives
"I don't feel I've really scratched the surface of what I want to do." - Gershwin, spoken to his sister shortly before his sudden death in 1937
"You know you should go to the conservatory, but since you won't, I'll tell you. First you find the logical way, and when you find it, avoid it, and let your inner self break through and guide you. Don't try to be anybody else but yourself." - Cook to Ellington, at the beginning of his career
"I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell." - Lenin
"A score is a child of loneliness that feeds off crowds."
"I believe that music should be collective hysteria and spells, violently of the present time." - Pierre Boulez
"Composition only gains power from failing to decide the eternal dispute. In a decentered culture, it has a chance to play a kind of godfather role, able to assimilate anything new because it has assimilated everything in the past."
Rating: really liked it
This is a comprehensive overview of Western music in the twentieth century. I was lucky enough to live in Los Angeles in the last decade when Disney Hall opened, so I heard music by many of these composers played by both the full orchestra and by smaller groups in the Green Umbrella series. Plus there was Jacaranda in Santa Monica. Those two sources taught me to appreciate modern music, so I read this with much more experience and curiosity than I would have had fifteen years ago.
But the operative word is ‘read’. In fact I listened to an audiobook, but it wasn’t much different than reading the book. What a lost opportunity--there were no interspersed audio examples of what Ross was writing about. I have heard perhaps 5 percent of the music he describes. I am not a musician, so I was unable to ‘hear’ in my head most of the pieces he describes with substantial verbal ’notation’. I suppose the problem was one of getting rights to that many recordings, but even one example for the major composers would have helped, especially for the last half of the century.
You can go to Ross’s website to get audio samples, which is an essential service if you’re reading the book, but it does seem as if integrating them into the audiobook woudl have been a no-brainer.
Tony has also done a wonderful service in assembling some websites to compensate for this lack; see his review at
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Part of the reason I enjoyed the book so much is that Ross’s own music preferences are on display, and they are very similar my own, excepting Britten. He is acidic on Pierre Boulez’s despotic rule in mid-Century, in particular on his devastating dismissal of earlier innovators like Sibelius. So one notes with a different attitude than before the tributes to Boulez in Sunday’s New York Times (and in fact, some of the ‘tributes’ are given with qualifications) and this years focus on Boulez in Berlin’s Festtage festival. He’s also a bit dismissive of Glass; I do like his Satyagraha nevertheless.
The book is written clearly, for readers of varying musical knowledge. I took two or three years of music lessons, and was able to follow a little of the discussion, but even a complete novice can follow much of the ‘plot’: the various developmental strands of composing schools as well as episodes featuring the full renegades like Henry Cowell. There are plenty of anecdotes to hold one’s interest. For someone with more musical knowledge there is plenty of information about the evolution of the Vienna School and the American avant garde as they invented more and more abstruse systems until the whole thing collapsed. Now we have Salonen and Ades and Adams and Saariiaho and Golijov (loved the Mass from the first moment I heard it years ago) and dozens more going off in all directions. What a cornucopia of ’noise'!
Rating: really liked it
Ross weaves biography, history, and musical description into a pleasing synthesis, in accessible nonacademic language. He does for 20th century classical music what Niall Ferguson did for the British Empire, in Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World. Both authors are terrific storytellers.
Among the interesting subplots are the relationships (at times close, friendly, grudgingly respectful, rivalrous, prickly, or downright hostile) between various composer pairs: Strauss and Mahler, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Britten and Shostakovich, Messiaen and Boulez, Boulez and Cage, Stravinsky and Boulez. (Boulez comes across as the asshole of the book.) After Mahler's death, Strauss said that "Mahler had been his 'antipode,' his worthy adversary." A colleague once heard this exchange between Prokofiev and Shostakovich:
Prokofiev: You know, I'm really going to get down to work on my Sixth Symphony. I've written the first movement...and now I'm writing the second, with three themes: the third movement will probably be in sonata form. I feel the need to compensate for the absence of sonata form in the previous movements.
Shostakovich: So, is the weather here always like this?
Schoenberg and Stravinsky, "the twin giants of modernism" and exiles of Europe, lived eight miles apart in Los Angeles, yet apparently never met or spoke. (This fascinating expatriate L.A. community also included Rachmaninov, conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel, and writers Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley.) It was only after Schoenberg's death that Stravinsky began to investigate twelve-tone composition for himself; he had been "deeply moved" after seeing Schoenberg's death mask at a dinner at Alma Werfel's house.
Messiaen was one of the few deeply religious modern composers. "Fellow composers would sometimes drop by Holy Trinity [in Paris] to find out what kind of music Messiaen played for the parishioners on an ordinary Sunday. Aaron Copland wrote in his 1949 diary: "Visited Messiaen in the organ loft at the Trinité. Heard him improvise at noon. Everything from the 'devil' in the bass, to Radio City Music Hall harmonies in the treble. Why the Church allows it during service is a mystery."
Rating: really liked it
Ross, whose articles in the New Yorker I have followed religiously for years, and continue to anticipate with a zeal otherwise reserved for The Wire, delivers a multi-layered and exhaustively researched portrait of a century's music and its reception. His account includes not only a collection of nuanced miniature biographies of composers—both the duly celebrated and the tragically neglected—and sweeping, intertextual analyses of "the music"—from jazz rags and pop songs to symphonic masterworks—but a breathtaking synthesis of how the twentieth century world produced the music it did, and how the world was refracted and recasted through its lens.
One of the more amusing of his many distillations is his pitting of the twin modernist conceits against one another—on the one hand welcoming the "ragtag masses" with goofy fanfares, sentimental tunes and light operas, while on the other, consecrating an utterly abstruse aesthetic language accessible only to a select group of sophisticates.
Like a great satirist, Ross is especially keen at revealing the ironic similarities between otherwise opposing spheres. "The cultish fanaticism of modern art turns out to be not unrelated to the politics of fascism," he writes: "both attempt to remake the world in utopian forms."
Indeed, The Rest is Noise evinces many of the attributes of a novel—lucid prose, richly drawn characters, illuminating convergences between internal worlds and external events—yet firmly tethered to historical truth. It's a rare thing to be so spellbound by a work of non-fiction.
Rating: really liked it
This is a tremendous work which dares to tell the great history of music in the 20th Century. But in that it aims so high, it also falls short of its promise.
There are some great "stories" that are recounted here, in particular, the portions concerning the premiere of Strauss' "Salome"; and the spirited rivalry between Strauss and Mahler; the unlikely journeys of Schoenberg and Shostakovich in the New World; and the drama surrounding Messiaen's "Quartet". With these stories, Alex Ross demonstrates his great talent for storytelling: detailed, sympathetic and well-paced. These stories seem to mirror the great drama within music and in the world that surrounds it.
But after the great upheaval of the Second World War, the book unravels just as a linear history of the classical tradition unravels into new strands, clashing philosophies and influences. Thus, as we reach closer to our present, the book loses momentum and we are faced with a catalog of names, works and brief summaries. You can't fault the author for the ending (this is what happened to classical music) but the lack of focus and coherent narrative was a disappointment.
What's missing is a substantial discussion of "social music" and how it's transformation into "popular music" created new possibilities and conflicts, as well as a tense dialogue, with the "classical" tradition. Classical music loses shape and also its audience because the world changes.
I'm looking forward to Alex Ross' next work as well as his next piece for the New Yorker.
