The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by Alex Ross
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alex RossEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-10-16
ISBN: 0374249393
Number of pages: 640
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Book Review: A highly accessible, fascinating read into the twentieth century's music
Summary: 5 Stars
Much ink has been spilled about modern classical music and the intellectual hurdles that it presents to audiences accustomed to the tunes of the 1800s. While Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso's creations of abstract grotesquery have snaked their way into the mainstream arts culture, Arnold Schoenberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen's masterpieces still belong to that mysterious realm of works that continue to baffle modern audiences with their unconventional takes on composition.
The subject of modern music is no novelty to the shelves of any distinguished bookstore; but the majority of books published on it are often shrouded in the language of academia, often confounding its readers even more than the obtuse sounds penned by its composers. In contrast to many of its predecessors, Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; $30.00) brilliantly disseminates the code of modern music by seamlessly coalescing the history of the 20th century with the great composers who propelled this musical evolution. With his mastery of the languages of music and prose, Ross offers a read that is accessible and thought provoking.
Alex Ross, classical music critic of the New Yorker, has always astounded me with his extraordinarily engaging and highly intelligent music critiques. The Rest is Noise, a seven-year work that culminated in this recent release, is perhaps his finest work to date. Ross' book reads like a novel, with composers like Strauss, Shostakovich, and Copland and political figures like Hitler, Stalin, and Kennedy as characters in the history of modern music. Its narration is a tour de force that sweeps the reader through the 20th century, taking us from genres as diverse as opera, chamber music, and symphonies to jazz, bebop, and tin-pan alley.
The first chapter begins with the music of the early 1900's, a bygone epoch during which Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss reigned as the kings of musical Vienna. These titans had just released two controversial works--Strauss' Biblical sexpot, Salome and Mahler's First Symphony--to a musical audience besotted with the Classical and Romantic traditions. In an age when the world was still recovering from the quasi-atonality of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Mahler and Strauss' more striking musical innovations proved groundbreaking in paving the way for the century's esoteric musical language.
Ross takes us to the war-and-politics-smitten world of Mahler, Strauss, Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Ravel, Sibelius, Janacek, Schoenberg, Krener, Korngold, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Bartok, Berg, Weill, and Webern, all of whom were subjected to the socio-political environment of pre-50's Europe and America. This era is highlighted by the pieces that each of these masters composed during times of war, oppression, liberation, politicking, and racism. The reader sees the world through the eyes of the Jewish Schoenberg composing atonal pieces in a Germany that swore death to Judentum; the patriotic Janacek and Bartok exploring the possibilities of combining folk tunes and ethnic speech modes into their operas and orchestral works; the African-American Duke Ellington reforming jazz during a time when blacks were banned from the white temples of music; and the fiscally cunning Strauss penning operas and tone poems in an environment where collaboration with Jewish musicians could mean death in the Third Reich.
The author winds the clock forward to the decades of Stravinsky, Britten, Varese, Boulez, Messiaen, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Gorecki, and Shostakovich, all of whom caught their audiences at the edge of their seats with unconventional, non-conformist compositions. The reader is treated to extensive analyses of Stravinsky's shocking ballets and orchestral suites, Britten's ventures into operas hinting at homosexual themes, Shostakovich's schizophrenic pieces seesawing between Soviet genius and political slavery, and Messiaen's oddly transfiguring liturgical works. Never before have the musical languages of the avant-garde and the modernist been so lucidly translated, and in here we develop an understanding of the psychological impetus that drove these composers into challenging their audiences with an art form opposite to the musical dialogues of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach.
Included also is a spatter of writings on American composers who forged the distinct musical voice of the New World. Copland the populist, Barber the American Schubert, Ives the modernist, and Cage the Yankee avant-garde are a few of the composers who played seminal roles in shifting the pendulum of musical America from the Old World to the New. Of interest to the admirers of independent music is the section on the minimalist composers Philip Glass, John Adams, and Steve Reich. This triumvirate of composers played huge roles in influencing the work of musicians like Sigur Ros, Björk, the Beatles, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, the Talking Heads, and Sufjan Stevens, each of whose work is brushed on lightly with Ross' incorporation of insight from the century's musical heritage.
As a fitting close to his book, Ross surveys the condition of classical music in the present century. The author stipulates that today's classical composers have achieved the once-impossible task of impregnating their theories into the vernacular language of pop. Music is in a state of flux, and the face of classical composition has metamorphosed from exclusively white to multiracial; from exclusively male to one that includes females; and from sounds deriving purely from classical instruments to those that stem from the most unimaginable sources. Foreign composers like Tan Dun, Unsuk Chin, Toru Takemitsu, Osvaldo Golijov, and Sofia Gubaidulina and even pop geniuses like Björk and Radiohead all play integral roles in transforming the landscape of classical music. This epiphany may come as strange to those who have been cultured to believing that great classical music stopped with the death of Tchaikovsky, but cultural and gender diversity have recently played integral roles in shaping the way we listen to the world.
In the end, Ross' book addresses a subject that is relevant even outside the musical sphere. You don't have to be a lover of classical music to thoroughly enjoy the wealth of insights that the author has to offer. And if you do, this book can easily inspire you to listen to the pieces Ross so vividly describes in this fascinating chronicle of cultural and musical history. Even now, as I listen to the closing pages of Berg's 3 Pieces for Orchestra, I look back to those pages Ross so generously wrote about the composer's personality and his genius. My understanding of Berg has never been clearer.
Summary of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
The scandal over modern music has not died down. While paintings by Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, shocking musical works from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring onward still send ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, the influence of modern music can be felt everywhere. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalist music has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward. Alex Ross, the brilliant music critic for The New Yorker, shines a bright light on this secret world, and shows how it has pervaded every corner of twentieth century life.
The Rest Is Noise takes the reader inside the labyrinth of modern sound. It tells of maverick personalities who have resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with the purest beauty or battered them with the purest noise, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art.
Ross, in this sweeping and dramatic narrative, takes us 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. We follow the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. In the tradition of Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches and Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, the end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.
Anyone who has ever gamely tried and failed to absorb, enjoy, and--especially--understand the complex works of Schoenberg, Mahler, Strauss, or even Philip Glass will allow themselves a wry smile reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross's outstanding The Rest Is Noise. Not only does Ross manage to give historical, biographical, and social context to 20th-century pieces both major and minor, he brings the scores alive in language that's accessible and dramatic. Take Ross's description of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, "in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forming in front of him. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music at the time. It contains fragments of the folk song 'Ach, du lieber Augustin'--the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler. For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating; the crucial line is 'Alles ist hin' (all is lost). The movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone. In them may be discerned traces of the bifurcated scale that begins Salome. But there is no longer a sense of tonalities colliding. Instead, the very concept of a chord is dissolving into a matrix of intervals." Armed with such a detailed aural roadmap, even a troglodyte--or a heavy metal fan--can explore these pivotal works anew. But it's not all crashing cymbals, honking tubas, and somber Germans stroking their chins. Ross also presents the human dramas (affairs, wars, etc.) behind these sweeping compositions while managing, against the odds, to discuss C-major triads, pentatonic scales, and B-flat dominant sevenths without making our eyes glaze over. And he draws a direct link between the Beatles and Sibelius. It's no surprise that the New York Times named The Rest Is Noise one of the 10 Best Books of 2007. Music nerds have found their most articulate valedictorian. --Kim Hughes
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