The Rest Is Noise

Strauss, Stravinsky and Schoenberg

Last summer, in a fit of self-improvement, I bought myself a copy of Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, a history of classical music in the twentieth century.  I finished it this week.  (That probably gives you a hint of where this is going.)  I bought it at least in part because the BF’s favourite musical era is the twentieth century (the BF is a music graduate), but also because I feel I should know more about classical music than I do — for a holder of a diploma in the piano, I’m a very ignorant person when it comes to symphonies and the like.

It took me so long to finish because my first attempt at it was derailed by feeling I couldn’t understand it without listening to all the pieces mentioned in the book, which would be a hiding to nothing (the book is 600 pages long, not including appendices, indices and the rest, and is appropriately stuffed with mentions of welters of individual pieces).  Ross does his best to meet the reader halfway, even collating an excellent listening guide on his website to help.  This, however, is not quite ideal, with small snippets rather than whole pieces — Ross can hardly do anything about this when almost everything he discusses is still under copyright, but it is nevertheless difficult, and definitely made my reading of the book difficult.

It was also made difficult by my realisation that sitting down to read this in one snifter is like sitting down to read Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd, a thing that I would never entertain the idea of doing.  Kiberd’s book is about the literature of the modern Irish nation, and is similarly enormous both in size and scope.  It is manifestly a book for digesting a chapter at a time, and I think this is fair to say of Ross’s book too – it will probably better serve musical undergraduates than it will the likes of me, and once I realised this it was hard to think of it as a book for pleasure.

Unfamiliar with the music and without copies of it to hand, by default I focussed much of my attention on the book’s many potted biographies of most of the key figures of the past century.  These were very good, and took in a great variety of figures both in personality and circumstances, from Sibelius’ lonely-sounding life in Finland to a sympathetic rendering of Richard Strauss’s difficult position in old age in Nazi Germany by way of Shostakovich’s incredibly difficult circumstances behind the Iron Curtain.  Easily the villain of the piece is Pierre Boulez, who sounds like a colossal dick, turning up to the concerts of other composers in order to boo, literally turning his back on composers he deemed insufficiently radical and penning obituaries that conclude thus: “I do not hesitate to write, not out of any desire to provoke a stupid scandal, but equally without bashful hypocrisy and pointless melancholy: SCHOENBERG IS DEAD” (394).  Britten comes out well; perhaps my favourite is Messaien, a person whose life was so open and straightforwardly lived that the worst anecdote that can be told about him was that once Messaien and his wife ate an entire pear tart in one sitting (486).

Apart from the biographical element, though, reading this book was frequently a sad experience for me; I increasingly felt that I just didn’t get the high-art music that Ross was dealing with, not helped by the fact that the music that I was familiar with and liked myself (such as the passages on Gershwin and Kern, which were easily the most enjoyable parts of the book for me) was consistently, snidely described as “populist” and, God help me, “middle-brow”.

The pacing, too, felt very uneven.  A chapter is lavished at the outset on a distinct place at a specific time (Paris in the twenties, Berlin in the twenties), giving ample time to set up important figures like Stravinsky and Schoenberg as well as the themes which would dominate their work (and by extension the work of much of the next 50 years).  These are followed by enormous chapters onRussia,AmericaandGermanyduring the Second World War – all important and interesting topics.  The postwar years are given decent attention, including a fascinating and completely new (to me) story about the Americans in Germany perpetrating psychological warfare through “the promotion of jazz, American composition, international contemporary music and other sounds that could be used to degrade the concept of Aryan cultural supremacy” (376).  But thereafter it feels like a whirlwind (primarily a whirlwind of the avant-garde which is, to put it mildly, not my cup of tea), with the last two decades worldwide being despatched in one all-encompassing chapter.  This last in particular it feels like nothing so much as Ross losing interest after having lavished attention on individual places earlier in the book.  I’m sure this is totally unfair – still, you can’t escape the fact that the whole of Asia is dealt with in four and a half pages in this last chapter.

I am sorry that this review sounds so relentlessly negative, but I think my expectations were high — I really hoped it would give me an “in” to this world, and it didn’t do that, most particularly because of the sore lack of an accompanying CD or four.  Maybe I should update this post in another year’s time after I’ve had a chance to scare up all the pieces that sounded worthwhile, but for now, this is how it is.