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200014
Ross, Alex
- The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Fourth Estate, London, 2008.
Reprint. Octavo hardcover; black boards with silver gilt spine titling and black endpapers; 624pp., monochrome plates. Densely spotted upper text block edge and scattered spotting on other edges with toning. Black dustwrapper slightly worn at edges and corners. Very good with wrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music. 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). As Ross examines the compromised fate of composers under Stalin and Hitler, the book ... 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 " ...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 Ades - 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. - abridged from the NY Times review by Geoff Dyer
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