The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century [Paperback]

Given that whole books could be written about virtually every single composer Alex Ross mentions in this mammoth survey, you'd be forgiven for thinking that 'The Rest is Noise' would be heavy on filler and light on critical insight. Whilst it's fair to say that as the musical world diversifies post-1950, Ross spends less and less time looking at the work of individual composers - this should take nothing away from an astounding work of scholarship.

Like any critic, Ross clearly has his own tastes and prejudices - composition to him is at its best when it addresses a popular audience. It's therefore unsurprising that he devotes more pages to composers such as Mahler, Strauss, Stravinksy, Sibelius and Britten over the 20th century's kookier figures. However, Ross is not simply bolstering the canon - Cage, Feldman, La Monte Young and Harry Partch are all given warm appraisals, even though none of them have been absorbed into the contemporary repertory.

Ross is gifted with a both a keen analytical ear (and eye) and a great generosity of spirit. Whilst he explores the darker totalitarian affiliations of composers such as Strauss, Webern, Orff and Shostakovich, he redeems them all from the blunt considerations of popular myth. In fact the only figure in the whole book who is subject to undisguised contempt is Pierre Boulez. In Ross' account he comes across as an arrogant, two-faced hypocrite - capable of acts of quite atrocious slander towards the very composers who made his work possible (Messiaen, Schoenberg, Stravinsky). It says a lot about Ross, that despite this he still finds time to admire Boulez's 'Marteau sans Maitre'.

Ross writes about music vividly, combining technical analysis with metaphorical explanations - so if, like me, you wouldn't know a tritone if it hit you over the head with a sausage, there's plenty here to provoke and engage. As far as I know, the only book covering similar ground to this is Michael Hall's 'Leaving Home' (written as a companion to the excellent TV series). Hall's book is definitely worth tracking down, even if it is sometimes a little technically abstruse its approach.
Ross' historical approach is enriching and rewarding - this is a rigorously researched book with a deeply humane tone- I don't expect to come across a better work of non-fiction this year.

If someone told you "Hey, I've got a great beach book for you, it's about 20th century classical music!" you would no doubt think they were pulling your leg. But that's what we have here, quite an accomplishment by Alex Ross, the music writer for The New Yorker. Ross's breezy combination of biography, social history and musical analysis makes the 543 pages fly by. I noticed at least one reviewer complain that Ross uses too many big words -- now there's someone who should stick to Dr. Seuss. The typical book on this topic is, indeed, dense and difficult to read, but Ross is a journalist and his practiced writing style is very reader-friendly. The opposite criticism, that THE REST IS NOISE is too shallow, is, I believe, misplaced. There are plenty of other books that go deeper into music theory and the avant-garde than Ross -- Morgan's Twentieth-Century Music is still essential -- but they are not going to reach as big an audience. I am quite glad that Ross has written this book, mainly because I am confident that it is going to expand the audience for modern and contemporary classical music.

Anyone who listens to a lot of 20th century classical music, as I do, is going to disagree with some of Ross's emphases and find omissions. One book cannot do justice to a century worth of music. Most of my disagreements, some of which I will outline, fall in the category of legitimate differences of aesthetic opinion. I would write a different book, but I haven't written it yet! But there is one bias of Ross's that I think he should have checked at the door, hence the four stars instead of five.

Of the six chapters in Part I (1900-1933), I enjoyed "City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties" the most. This is a fascinating period to me, and I was happy to learn more about Weill, Hindemith, Krenek, Wolpe and others. Ross profiles Alban Berg, clearly one of his favorites. The chapter on "Schoenberg, Debussy and Atonality" is a good introduction, though far from definitive. His repeated reference to Thomas Mann's novel "Doctor Faustus," based on Arnold Schoenberg, becomes quickly annoying as Ross uses it to stand in for insight into the actual composer as opposed to his Faustian fictional counterpart. The actual Schoenberg made no pacts with the Devil, regardless of how much some people over the years have disliked his music! Ross devotes an entire chapter to Sibelius, and while I love Sibelius's symphonies, he could have included Nielsen, Martinu and others in a chapter on how unfashionable the symphonic form became in the 20th century. His Chapter 4 on "American Composers from Ives to Ellington" stretches to include jazz composers in the classical canon, and I think this is admirable except that for everything he includes, something gets left on the cutting-room floor. When we get to the late 20th century he doesn't get to the Chicago AACM composers (Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill), for instance, a fantastically inventive group of African-American composers.

Part II (1933-1945) is probably the strongest part of the book, with chapters on Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, and FDR's America. Dmitri Shostakovich and Aaron Copland are central to the Russian and American stories, while Strauss, Hindemith and Hartmann all feature in the German chapter. Ross shows his knack for social history to best advantage here, and of course the drama is strong.

The postwar coverage is more haphazard, an unavoidable problem which no music writer yet has been able to solve. The music fragments and becomes less central to most national cultures as it is increasingly pushed aside by amplified rock and other "art in the age of mechanical reproduction." Ross situates classical music in the context of the Cold War, and reveals the deliberate development of academic serialist composition as an alternative to Left-oriented populism. Ross includes a great quote from Schoenberg on "the Schoenberg clique" which reveals insight on the part of both Schoenberg and Ross. The author again indulges his preferences with an entire chapter on Britten. In this case I don't share the author's enthusiasm, and would much rather have seen a broader chapter devoted to the development of 20th century opera, but I will grant that for a journalist a 20 or 30 page profile (of Sibelius or Britten) offers a chance to break out of the otherwise surface skim of a survey. So I can't argue with Ross's choice too much -- he is a compelling writer who tells a good story.

The last chapters, 13-15, are a typical blur as Ross tries to cover everything from the 1960s on. He does a profile on French composer Olivier Messiaen, and a shorter one on Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti. He reduces much of the '60s avant-garde to "textural music," which says more about Ross than about the music. Like most people he clearly prefers conventional music that is tonal, melodic, pretty and representational -- the latter becomes clear in his summaries of various compositions, which invariably involve painting a picture of something. In this regard he may be an excellent guide for most people, but not for the listener who is attracted to the avant-garde. Ross's coverage resembles walking past a carnival marvelling and laughing at the strange goings-on. He warms up to tonal Minimalism, and includes Cage, Feldman and Partch in the same chapter. I could list all the great late 20th century composers that Ross either briefly mentions or leaves out entirely, but suffice it to say that he leaves out more than he covers. It seems that this is always the problem with history -- it becomes harder the closer you get to the present.

My one real objection to THE REST IS NOISE is Ross's knee-jerk anti-Left bias. I noticed this when I first read the book a couple of years ago in his discussion of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's opera "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny." Ross says "the libretto was widely understood as a protest against rampant capitalism, although it reads just as well as a critique of the fake utopia of the Soviet Union" (205). Now if Ross wants to critique the USSR that is one thing, but to say that that is what Weill and Brecht were doing is just flat out wrong. Like the better known and more popular "Threepenny Opera" (with "Mac the Knife") , this is a story about gamblers, prostitutes and other criminals, meant to caricature greedy capitalists. Ross wonders why Brecht prefers to portray petty criminals, apparently missing this obvious point. Ross makes clear his absolute hatred of Brecht, going out of his way to paint him and his musical collaborator Hanns Eisler as "thuggish," "brutish," and "ruthless," pursuing a "will to violence." Ross ends the section on Weil and Brecht by seeming to celebrate the death of a Communist partisan in a brawl with Nazis. Later he mentions Helmut Lachenmann's avant opera "The Litte Match Girl" and condemns Lachenmann for "terrorist chic" for quoting Gudrun Ensslin in the libretto (a passage that is actually not even audible to the listener). The relevance of the passage is that Ensslin, a teen-age German girl in the 1960s, set fire to a shopping mall during the Vietnam War to protest the high-consumption life of the middle class while bombs were being dropped on Vietnamese peasants. And the same liberal Ross who equates the Nazis and the Left as a bunch of thugs nowhere finds room to criticize the U.S. or any of its allies for dropping more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in all of World War II, or Hiroshima & Nagasaki, or numerous CIA coups and military invasions, or any misdeeds whatsoever on the part of the U.S. for that matter. Ross apparently employs a very selective definition of thuggishness.

But this is the one serious flaw in an otherwise superb book that, as I said, seems to have the potential to attract lots of young, new listeners to contemporary classical music. My recommendation to counteract Ross's bias is to listen to Eislermaterial, the collection of Hanns Eisler's music and Bertolt Brecht's lyrics assembled by German composer Heiner Goebbels (see my review). The Weill/Brecht collaboration Berlin Requiem (see my review) is another fine work that you might not have the pleasure of hearing if you allowed Ross to turn your head.

Good reading, and good listening!

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If you want to know more about Twentieth Century classical music, read `The rest is noise'. This book has already won widespread plaudits, including being the winner of the Guardian First Book award 2008. It is a chunky tome - you need strong wrists to read in bed! The main text ends on page 591, to be followed by about 100 pages of notes, recommended listening and a good index.

Ross has an astonishing breadth of knowledge, conveyed with clarity, so his is a very educational book. The classical music of the last century contains many streams and reputedly difficult pieces that make us wary. This fractured, controversial and confusing musical landscape needs a guide, a Virgil to lead us through hell, and Ross is that man. He is a likeable, positive and enthusiastic companion, and will surely lead you to listen to more of the music he recommends, as I have done under his influence.

Ross does not treat music in isolation, but sets it in a vivid context of the history of the times. Politics, war, literature, philosophy and so forth influence music, just as music influences other spheres of our society. He is most enlightening on the birth of modernism before the first world war, the negative impact of the Nazis, the terror under Stalin, the cultural battles of the cold war and so on. By reading this book, you should have a better overview of many themes of 20th century history.

The definition of `classical' music is deeply difficult in the 20th Century, but the author has a clear idea of what is the serious music that he wants to tell us about. He is catholic and eclectic in his tastes, with no trace of snobbery. He acknowledges and enthuses about the influences of music hall, jazz, blues, folk music, bebop, rock, electronic music and so on, as well as explaining how serious music influenced and informed them, in turn. As he wisely says in his epilogue: "Music history is too often treated as a kind of Mercator projection of the globe, a flat image representing a landscape that is in reality borderless and continuous".

The story opens with the dramatic and distinct impacts of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, while showing their connections back to Wagner and Debussy and so on. He explicates the revolutionary newness of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and their followers. The galvanic effect of the rule-breaking dissonances, atonality, rhythms and other innovations of that era can be appreciated from his narrative. However, none of us in this age can participate in the shock to audiences at, for instance, `Salome' in 1906 or `The rite of spring' in 1913, because our ears are already so attuned to the full range of modern styles and techniques. The audiences of a hundred years ago would have been purely soaked in what you could call the (first) Viennese school of classical music, and so more easily shocked.

Excitement to the ear comes from when the composer violates the established rules, gives us what we had not predicted. This is nothing new - Mozart famously wrote a `dissonnance' quartet and revolutionised the subject matter of Opera with `Figaro'. Artists like Schoenberg could enjoy the fight to break through conventions, and achieve fame / notoriety within intellectual circles. The musical history of the twentieth century could be (simplistically) described as successive waves of breaking convention, even insulting the audience, until you reach the extreme techniques of Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Birtwhistle et al. However, the problem is a reductio ad boredom. When all the rules are broken, or there are no rules, then the excitement of breaking the rules disappears, leaving a sort of nothingness.

I reflected that the exciting iconoclasm occurring in music was mirrored in parallel events in painting (think of Picasso), poetry (for example Thomas Eliot), architecture (such as Frank Lloyd Wright) or even science (obviously, Einstein). There is an astonishing sense of the zeitgeist flowing in the same direction. Ross does not stray off his own patch; these are my own observations. Here again, free form poetry can be seen to tend towards boredom, compared with the admirable felicity of expressions within tight conventions, such as Alexander Pope.

Ironically, composers were just as much seeking to tie themselves within new rules, such as `12 tone' or `total serialism' or matrix compositions. Ross is not dogmatic or disparaging of many of these movements - he seems to find merit and interest in nearly everything. Naturally, with so much to choose from, he concentrates his writing on what he personally likes. He admits that he cannot cover all composers in any depth, and makes bold selections. For instance, he devotes many pages to Benjamin Britten, asking us to enjoy the analysis of the one British artist as representative of many other worthy artists from the same country.

One can argue about who you would like to see included in this tome - and each special plea would make the book longer and heavier. Clearly Ross had to draw the line somewhere. Well, I personally would have liked more coverage of Alexander Scriabin, Edward Elgar and Nicholas Maw. Possibly they do not fit the themes or the chapter headings, but they produced individual works that must surely rank as supreme achievements of the century, namely and respectively `The poem of Ecstasy', `Cello concerto' and `Odyssey'.

I like the way Ross pauses from the broad narrative to describe individual pieces in detail, such as Strauss's `Salome', Shostakovich's `Fifth symphony', Ellington's `Black, brown and beige', Messiaen's `Quartet for the end of time' or ` Berg's `Lulu'. These are high quality sleeve notes and engender a hunger to listen to the music. I responded by buying CDs of some of the pieces, and made enjoyable discoveries. Illustrating the point I made earlier about the modern ear being already attuned to the revolutionary techniques, I found Schoenberg's `5 pieces for orchestra' and Webern's `6 pieces for orchestra' very worthwhile - not shocking. Certainly one should not treat this music as background music - it deserves attention - but that applies to all serious music.

He has many arresting turns of phrase and witty thoughts; for example: "Cocteau and Poulenc were enjoying a one-night stand with a dark-skinned form, and they had no intention of striking up a conversation with it the following day." He comes up with connections, facts and interpretations that are enlightening, whether it is pointing out the high proportion of gay artists, the influences of Jazz (and the influences on Jazz) or the brilliant description of minimalist music (Reich etc) being like driving along the interstate highways of America.

Read this book for education, enjoyment and elevation. If you have patches of knowledge of Twentieth Century music (as I do), Ross will tie them together for you, give them more resonance and encourage you to listen to more. He would be someone I would like to join for a fortnight's journey on the trans-Siberian express (with an ipod to listen to the music samples as we went along). I feel a long and rewarding journey has been completed by reading this book through.

John Vernon