Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise

This is a very entertaining book, full of anecdotes about selected 20th-century composers. It's worth reading just for the anecdotes.

But there's not much more to it. It is a book about composers, not about music.

It's aimed at a broad, uninitiated audience and therefore contains no examples of printed music. But a CD of snippets would have been invaluable to non-musicians, I would have thought. Imagine a book introducing 20th century art which included not a single illustration.

The reader is thus left to decide, based only on words, whether he might like the music of an unfamiliar composer. And on that basis, he will be led down some strange paths.

Omissions

As if to counter-balance James Naughtie's book The Making of Music, which failed to mention a great roll-call of American composers, Ross takes his bias from the other side of the Atlantic and gives short shrift to some significant European composers, but plenty of space to some American composers whose music will, I predict, seem tediously unfashionable soon.

Elliott Carter, possibly the greatest American composer ever to write, is allotted one page. But American composers of the extremely-repetitive type are presented as though they were the grand culmination of music history; LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, and John Adams are each given two pages, Philip Glass three, and Steve Reich six pages plus a photo. Even Leonard Bernstein, long ago discredited as a composer of serious music, is given three times as much space as Carter.

Meanwhile, three of our best contemporary British composers — Oliver Knussen, George Benjamin, and Jonathan Harvey — are given one sentence each. (For a much longer list of important omissions, see the article in the periodical Notes, volume 65 number 1, by Richard D. Burbank.)

Most amazingly, one could read the entire book without realising that Bartók wrote six string quartets that are the heart of the century's repertoire. More space is dedicated to Strauss' grandchildren than to Bartók's quartets.

Oppression vs. freedom

Ross would have us believe that modernists like Schoenberg and Boulez represent some kind of oppressive regime, forcing a politically correct type of music down our throats, and we should be grateful to have been rescued by freedom-loving composers of more popular music.

But let's think for a minute about oppressive regimes. Hitler and Stalin come to mind. What type of music did they ban? Modernists. They dictated that people should hear only music which they considered tuneful — "music of the people".

I'm indebted to the composer Richard Derby for his observation that "if one is striving to connect musical trends to political brands, one would have to conclude that atonality tends to represent freedom of thought, individuality of vision, and independence from any political brand".

Let me take a further step. Which huge, unstoppable force dictates what we see on television, what we hear on the radio and in concert halls? Commercialism. Consumerism. The idea that something that isn't making money (because it doesn't appeal to the masses) is worthless. And I'm afraid that Ross sides with this particular dictator.

Misleading

Throughout the book, Ross paints misleading pictures of what certain composers were "about". Any composer who didn't write tonal music was, he hints, trying not to communicate with an audience. For example, he says that Carter "embraced the aesthetic of density and difficulty", ignoring a vast body of Carter's own thoughtful prose in which he discusses ways in which a composer can try to impart character and meaning to music. Bartók's engaging second quartet is dismissed as an attempt to be "sufficiently modern", while his fourth quartet — truly his most "modern" piece — is wrongly described as a return to first principles, ie. tonality.

Glancing through the photos, we see popular but relatively unimportant figures like Kurt Weill, George Gershwin, Reich and Adams, but no sign of Bartók or Webern, two of the most influential composers of the century.

Glancing through the index, Hindemith gets more references than Debussy; Gershwin more than Webern; Wagner (dead before the 20th century) more than Stockhausen; Brecht (not a composer) more than Poulenc; and Shostakovich more than almost anyone. Like everything else ever written about Shostakovich, this book talks a lot about Stalin, as if the relationship with Stalin makes Shostakovich worth listening to.

Conclusion

How sad that thousands of people will unknowingly be led to so many wrong conclusions, and miss much of what the twentieth century really offers.

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