Alex Ross brings the noise

New Yorker critic Alex Ross surveys the many faces of 20th-century classical music
By Max Goldberg
lit@sfbg.com

“In the classical field it has long been fashionable to fence music off from society, to declare it a self-sufficient language,” Alex Ross writes in the preface to his new opus, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. “In the hyper-political twentieth century, that barrier crumbles time and again.... My subtitle is meant literally; this is the twentieth century heard through its music.” This is a bit of a misrepresentation, since The Rest Is Noise is first and foremost a review of composers’ lives, but Ross is indeed working on a grand canvas, stitching together innumerable discrete innovations in a seesawing account of modern classical music’s volatile politics of style.

Smart and cute? Hubba hubba ...

Which is to say that while The Rest Is Noise may be telescopic as a political history -- the 20th century here belongs to Central Europe, Russia, and America, with only minor walk-ons for whole continents -- it’s entirely effective as a history of ideas. Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker, guides us with a generalist’s passion for connections and large-scale developments. He revels in the coincidences and overcrowding of the 20th century: in the way Richard Strauss’s life bridged Wagner to “American soldiers whistling ‘Some Enchanted Evening’” in Germany’s decimated cities; in the fact that two diametrically opposed titans of European composition (Schoenberg and Stravinsky) came to live miles apart in a Los Angeles teeming with émigrés (their neighbors included Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Alma Mahler, and Aldous Huxley).

Running through these overlapping microhistories are the categorizations that define 20th-century music as a realm of ideas: dissonance and tonality, zeitgeist and heartland, modernism and pastiche.

Bit players emerge as ideologues, while the longer careers gradually phase between different standards (Stravinsky, for example, eventually came to experiment with atonality). Certain distinctions ultimately ring false over the long haul; for example, “Theodore Adorno ... saw modernism and kitsch as polar opposites, yet even he admitted that modernism can bring forth its own kind of kitsch -- a melodrama of difficulty that easily degenerates into a sort of superannuated adolescent angst.” Other trends, however, accumulate momentum. Gustav Mahler’s suspicion of popular approval crops up again and again, and we might easily find corollaries of Vienna’s turn-of-the-century atonal scene -- “the depressing spectacle of artists and audiences washing their hands of each other, giving up on the dream of common ground” -- in our own fin de siècle.

Along the way, we meet innumerable idiosyncratic characters who do not easily fit into the broader historical movements. And it’s to Ross’s credit that he doesn’t shortchange these stories for a cleaner line, paying full due to Will Marion Cook’s dream of being a “black Beethoven,” Olivier Messiaen’s pantheism, and Henry Cowell’s avant-garde musings in a San Francisco he described as “an undefiled Eden.” A whole chapter is dedicated to Jean Sibelius, the lonesome Finnish composer who once referred to himself as an “apparition from the woods” in his diary.

The Rest Is Noise contains several big stories -- the fabled premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, for example, gets a wonderful gloss here -- but as with so many histories of the 20th century, all roads lead to the rise of totalitarianism. It was at the beginning of World War I that Schoenberg conflated art and morality in a letter to his wife, Alma, writing, “Now we will throw these mediocre kitschmongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit,” but his words clearly foretell the Reich’s devastating dreams of grandeur. It’s a tricky business sorting out the ways in which “bloodless intellectuality” translates to “bloody barbarism,” but Ross dives into the fray in his complex readings of Strauss’s and Dmitry Shostakovich’s tangos with Hitler and Stalin, two dictators who pointedly “aped the art-loving monarchs of yore.” The mechanics of complicity are hardly clear-cut, but the consequences are stark: “In the wake of Hitler, classical music suffered not only incalculable physical losses ... but a deeper loss of moral authority.”

Ross writes that in the postwar years “music exploded into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances, and party splits.” Tracking the conceptual gambits of Cage, Boulez, Stockhausen, and all their children changes the scope of Ross’s analysis: from an investigation of composers’ lives to a cataloging of movements and manifestos. That broad promise of “the twentieth century heard through its music” dissolves in these later sections of the book, as Ross struggles to keep pace with the avant-garde. Part of the problem is simply that the stakes of classical music changed in these years. Ross can draw Soviet Russia from Shostakovich, Nazi Germany from Strauss, and McCarthy-era America from Aaron Copland because these composers operated on a populist, symbolic scale -- a far cry from the coteries found at century’s end.

Still, while Ross may ultimately fall short of the cohesiveness promised in the book’s preface, it’s an easily forgivable lapse for so grand-minded a survey, one all the more valuable for the many music lovers who know more of Brian Eno than of La Monte Young. If for nothing other than its detailed tallying, The Rest Is Noise is enough to open a hundred years of music to a lifetime of listening.

THE REST IS NOISE: LISTENING TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
By Alex Ross
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
640 pages, $30
www.therestisnoise.com

CONVERSATIONS AND READING
Wed/17, 8 p.m., $19
City Arts and Lectures
With Linda Ronstadt and John Rockwell
Herbst Theatre
401 Van Ness, SF
(415) 392-4400 (tickets), www.cityarts.net

Thurs/18, 7 p.m., free
In conversation with Cynthia Gorney
UC Berkeley, Wheeler Auditorium
Near Bancroft and Telegraph, Berk.
journalism.berkeley.edu

Sun/21, 7 p.m., free
Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera
(415) 927-0960, www.bookpassage.com

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