Back in early November last year a friend emailed me a book review. The book in question wasn’t due for UK publication until March – I ordered a copy and then more or less forgot about it until it arrived a few weeks ago. I finished reading it yesterday, and I’m half-inclined to sit down and start it again immediately. The Rest Is Noise is New Yorker critic Alex Ross’ stab at a history of twentieth century classical music. Probably my scanty knowledge of classical (very scanty, as in, I probably own more cds by the Fall or the Ex alone than I do of classical in toto) increased the book’s impact. As with Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up & Start Again, the sheer wealth of knowledge new to me was revelatory. That same ignorance means I’m not in any position to comment on the fairness or thoroughness of Ross’ treatment, but with that caveat, I will say this is one of the best books on music I have ever read. The writing is incisive and evocative – even when his discussion of individual pieces moves into technical description, he manages to convey some measure of the impact and the sound of the music, and his evident love of the music inspires (as with any good music writer) the desire to listen to the music, and to hear what he hears in it.
Ross doesn’t confine himself to a narrow definition of history, situating musical developments in a broader artistic, social and political context. Indeed the central section of the book deals with the relationship between music and politics between the wars, in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s USA. I think Ross would like to be able to say that art is inevitably deformed by politicization and irreducibly crippled under totalitarian governments. There’s certainly an argument that the great works produced in this period are only evidence of impossibility of achieving a truly totalitarian state. The treatment of Shostakovich’s fraught relationship with the Soviet apparat is nuanced – the more explicit Nazi sympathies of Webern and Strauss are not glossed over. He demonstrates the political influences on the emergence of Darmstadt after the war, and notes the covert funding of avant-garde music by the CIA for propaganda purposes during the Cold War. (Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid The Piper is an excellent account of this somewhat surreal propaganda campaign – abstract expressionism to combat agit-prop).
The chapters are broadly thematic, avoiding strict chronology in the aim of a clearer account of the various directions of development pointing up continuities that could easily be obscured. Composers representing those who assiduously cultivated their own gardens (Sibelius and Britten) get stand-alone chapters, while Schoenberg and Stravinsky reappear throughout the book, the former setting the form for avant-garde tendencies across the century, the latter desperately striving to master the critically-acclaimed aesthetic of the day. If the book becomes more fragmented in the later chapters, it is because there are no such canonical figures as Schoenberg holding sway over an increasingly atomised tradition. The result is a fascinatingly rich, complex book, thick with character and incident. The riot at the premiere of The Rite Of Spring, he comments, was far from unique – the concert audiences at the time often divided into conservatives more than happy to give the bird to work they thought sub-par and aesthetes who were overjoyed at the opportunity to excoriate the philistine masses in response. The book is dotted with performances that end in riots – I think he nominates Steve Reich as the last major composer to receive this particular honour. Elsewhere, we see a young Morton Feldman being admonished to write music for the man in the street – looking out the window, the man passing in the street proved to be Jackson Pollock. Ross mercifully resists the temptation to shoehorn extraneous jazz and rock into the book, and generally displays decent if obvious taste when discussion spills into these areas.
The Rest Is Noise might not be a perfect book – I’ve seen some entirely reasonable criticisms elsewhere – but the scale of its’ ambition makes perfection unachievable. That it succeeds as much as it does is remarkable, and for me the measure of that success is the months and years I am going to spend listening to the music that Ross so evidently loves. That, presumably, is all the success he’s looking for.
[The man himself maintains a blog, also called The Rest Is Noise. Among other things, there is a section devoted to audio files of excerpts from pieces mentioned in the book.]
