The Rest Is Noise

Right when I've burrowed in to two works of criticism that I just know are going to be slow reads and a lengthy novel, what arrives on my doorstep but Alex Ross's new book. I think my resolve lasted for about a minute, and then I just started promising myself that I'd read it all, somehow.

Ross is probably well-know to many readers as the classical music critic for The New Yorker. I've enjoyed his writing there, and I'm enjoying it in The Rest Is Noise. The book is his account of what's been going on in classical for the last 100 years, a period that is often thought of as a more or less dead time for classical music.

I'm about 1/5 of the way through, and so far it has been about the birth of experimental and atonal music. I'm finding the reasons for this interesting. Part of this seems to do with the times, that composers are reaching out to more atonal sounds to create greater contrasts fit to embody the greater extremes that are being found in society. It's also a factor of the literature that is being produced; many of the works Ross describes are musical settings of dramas and poems that are being written in contemporary Paris. And Ross also links the development of interest in folk music to the larger artistic tends toward the natural, exotic, and pastoral.

And yet, sometimes these developments are simply the product of a single will--I find it interesting that Ross pretty unambiguously states that completely atonal music emerged thanks to the will of one man (Schoenberg) and the fact that he found two able and willing disciples.

Thus far Ross has done a fine job of making the architecture of the music comprehensible to someone who doesn't know much about octaves and keys. Part of this is that Ross always has a pretty good image ready, as in this description of Strauss's opera Salome:

In the Salome scale, not just two notes but two key-areas, two opposing harmonic spheres are juxtaposed. From the start, we are plunged into an environment where bodies and ideas circulate freely, where opposites meet.

Although I'm a bit fuzzy on how Strauss would juxtapose two key-areas, Ross makes clear why this is an innovation and what it means in the context of the work itself.

Another thing I like is how Ross has situated each chapter around certain groupings and/or oppositions of composers. Some of these groupings are fairly obvious (e.g. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg), but even the obvious ones are helping me to get a grip on the overall picture. For instance, knowing that Strauss and Mahler had a difficult relationship, and that  Schoenberg looked up to Strauss while also having a difficult relationship with Mahler helps me develop an overall idea of how all the music fits together. Instead of remembering five separate composers, I can put them into two "schools" as a simple mnemonic.

And lastly, I'm impressed by Ross's range. He's used lengthy quotes from Mann to elucidate the meaning of Strauss's music, and has drawn on pieces of art to provide concrete images for musical structures. What's more, he's quoted from the source material for a number of atonal operas, even going so far as to sketch thumbnail bios of the writers  who created the sources and situating them in regards to the literary scene at the time. I don't know if this is the product of able research assistants or simply that Ross is a knowledgeable fellow, but it certainly makes his prose impressive.

The LAT has interviewed Ross. (Apparently they couldn't decide whether to bold or italicize the interviewer's contribution to the conversation.)

Comments

[Daniel]

Hmm sounds interesting. I read a similar book as an undergrad, maybe titled How to Listen to Music, something like that, which explained different approaches and movements, atonality, etc. A good introduction.

[mike]

I've never heard Salome but I love Strauss's tone poems (Til Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, etc.). A quick Internet search turned up a Web page called Salome's Leitmotifs and Keys. Down at the bottom it describes one of Salome's keys as A and John the Baptist's as E-flat, which are a tritone apart. The tritone interval is contained in the whole-tone scale (Salome's scale?) -- a tonal progression in whole steps which therefore uses only six different notes and avoids tonal triads and major or minor scales.

The harmonic signature of Stravinsky's Petrouchka is the famous tritone clash between C major and F-sharp major chords, the "Petrouchka Chord." It's easy to hear the bitonality in Petrouchka.

Also, the Berg Violin Concerto, although a twelve-tone piece, is basically in a key (G-minor). I've only studied jazz harmony so I'm hardly an expert on classical music.

The Ross book sounds really interesting, though I'll probably never see it at the library. I liked Geoff Dyer's short review in the NYT. His review of Ben Ratliff's "Coltrane: The Story of a Sound," which I have read, beats the NYT review by Pankaj Mishra, who doesn't seem to grasp that it's an attempt to demythologize Coltrane's late period especially.

[Pierre Blondin]

Alex also gave a talk at Google in whbich he summarizes many of the developments of 20th century music, which is worth watching here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOSZ4BqQ4Og

1) This book is far too late

2) Music written after WWII is more interesting (I say intersting, not quality) than he makes it sound

3) The book supposedly doesn't respects convections, yet Ross is dividining whole musical world on classical and pop, which is untrue. Synthesised music is principaly neither of the two