Summer reading II: Noise

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

The end of the 19th century and its fin de siѐcle foreboding set the stage for all of the scandalous performances and “rioting audiences” with which the history of 20th century music unfolds. I had heard before in my own music history studies of the performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprѐs-midi d’un faune as each roused a tonally lazy and satisfied bourgeoisie out of its collective conformity. Ross builds the story slowly and concentrates on the artistic and personal biographies of the major composers, inserting where necessary the descriptions and music theory to make the story comprehensible.

The main theme of the book is one of the rise of diverse conceptions of tonality, including atonality and its several versions, as part of serious music in a legacy of “art for art’s sake” that he implies has served the cause of serious music poorly over the century (I prefer the term “serious” to “classical” since I reserve the latter term for Mozart and Haydn and their contemporaries). To other versions of tonality that were explored, one would add those derived from Far Eastern and indigenous cultural traditions, and these emerged as western musicians discovered other musical systems.

I enjoyed reading about Berg, Schoenberg, and the arrival of so many later on in California and Los Angeles. The rise of minimalism and Philip Glass, one of my favorites, could have been more thoroughly explored. Finally, the end of the book ,with its rather superficial coverage of those “serious -music- or jazz-influenced “ musicians in the pop, rock, and folk categories, made me wish that at the outset he had covered only the fate of serious music rather strictly. However, he was right to include the evolution of jazz improvisation into its cool phase, and the ordered noise of John Cage. The impassioned narrative of how each successive set of composers try to take the musical trends to the next level, and the readable character of the book, both served, I’m sure, to win it the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2007.

What does twentieth century music say to us about that century and its violent upheavals, wars, and ideological shifts? It would be easy to speak of fragmentation and globalization; those are heard in the rise of percussion and the Babel of new instruments and tonalities as well as new amplification. But so much hatred is covered by the false sweet sounds; now in the twenty-first century we can hear sweet hymns of Christian fundamentalism and detect nothing of the insecurity and racial fears of a new right wing. Perhaps I am just an aging 1960’s person as I long for music that is not just angry and eager to shock; we need the music of peace at a deeper level. This may be where Philip Glass and his zen minimalism as well as the themes of Kundun and Satyagraha come in.

Postscript: A real benefit to the book is its web site audio files, and while some are very short (owing to permissions and the length of the book), for students it would be essential to listen to the excerpts; music survey courses of course include CDs and databases which provide more extensive coverage, but –this is, after all, free.