Their terrifying sounds

The great 20th century composers revolutionized music, only to be rewarded with obscurity. Can the New Yorker's Alex Ross revive them in a world of Britney Spears?

By Kevin Berger

Read more: Books, Stanley Kubrick, Books Features, Iraq War

 

A photo composite of Igor Stravinsky, Oliver Messiaen, John Cage and Bela Bartok

Nov. 2, 2007 | Alex Ross is my favorite rock critic. He writes about music in vivid language humming with intelligence. He tells great stories about musicians' lives and illuminates their work with the light of his own experiences. His critical insights flow out of a deep respect for artists, and his judgments depend on the emotional and intellectual success of their designs. Ross reminds me of the early days of Rolling Stone and Creem, when journalists stretched themselves and their vocabularies to express the music from the inside. Before the centrifugal force of the mass media flung music into a thousand silos and opinions, good rock writers managed to unite artist and reader in the heart of a shared culture. Everybody felt they were singing the same exciting song.

All right, so much for the clever opening. Ross, as you may or may not know, is the classical music critic of the New Yorker. But in the past decade, employing the spry rhythms of pop journalism, and displaying an unabashed affinity for Pavement and Radiohead, Ross has managed to spring classical music from its encrusted shell and make it feel contemporary. That's a mighty admirable feat and now it reaches something close to magnificence in his first book, "The Rest Is Noise."

As you've no doubt heard, classical music is supposed to be dead. It's buried somewhere beneath an avalanche of pop CDs, TVs, Broadway ticket stubs, computers and Danielle Steel paperbacks. For good measure, that ash heap of history also contains the syllabuses from old music education classes and foreclosure notices for symphony halls that are now 24-Hour Fitness gyms. Supposedly the populace is too dumb to appreciate Beethoven's monumental Ninth Symphony and too drugged by Celine Dion singing some song from "Titanic" to care.

If Beethoven and Mozart are supposed to be barely noticeable in the sports arena of pop culture, 20th century composers from Alban Berg to John Adams have been assigned seats so far up in the nosebleed section that they are mere specks in the crowd. From 1900 to 2000, Ross writes, classical music "experienced what can only be described as a fall from a great height. At the beginning of the century, composers were cynosures on the world stage, their premieres mobbed by curiosity seekers." When Mahler walked the streets of Vienna in the 1900s, passersby would stop and whisper to themselves, "Der Mahler!" "A hundred years on," Ross writes, "no one whispers, 'Der Adams!,' as the composer of El Nino walks the streets of Berkeley."

Actually, that's not true. I've walked the streets of Berkeley with Adams and people did recognize and greet him by name. Of course, I'm not about to say that 20th century classical is alive and well based on my experience as a journalist, interviewing Adams one day. But I am about to say that 20th century classical music is definitely not dead and is more relevant to us today than our teeming culture has dared acknowledge in a long time. All we've needed is a brilliant reminder. And that's exactly what Ross delivers. His book peels away the old critical myths and theories shrouding 20th century music and swings open the door to understanding its manifold pleasures.

"The Rest Is Noise" is a long and thrilling ride on the social and intellectual currents that shaped the century's vanguard composers, from Stravinsky to Steve Reich. As Ross writes: "Composers weren't simply engaging in artificial games; they were asking mighty questions about what art meant and how it related to society." In that way, "The Rest Is Noise" is reminiscent of Roger Shattuck's "The Banquet Years," the literary critic's anatomy of the avant-garde in Paris at the end of the century. For all I know, Shattuck's book still inspires college bohemians to wear black and mimic psychotic playwright Alfred Jarry, as it no doubt did the members of the sensational postpunk band Pere Ubu, who stole the name of Jarry's hilariously obscene, mass-murdering antihero for their own.

With his own bohemian verve, Ross re-creates the cultural scandals that greeted the century's tradition-busting works, from Strauss' salacious opera "Salome" to John Cage's "4'33," in which pianist David Tudor sat on a stage in Woodstock, N.Y., opened the piano lid and played nothing. For all artistic purposes, the century dawned with the 1913 debut at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees of "The Rite of Spring," a new work by a young Stravinsky for the Ballet Russes. Pounding rhythms and dissonant harmonies filled the hall as choreographer Nijinsky's dancers shivered and stomped. "Howls of discontent went up from the boxes, where the wealthiest onlookers sat," Ross writes. "Immediately, the aesthetes in the balconies and the standing room howled back."

Unlike most retellings of the legendary performance, attended by Paris luminaries Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein, Ross' doesn't stop at the ruckus. He adds a welcome coda. "In a matter of days, confusion turned into pleasure, boos into bravos. Even at the first performance, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, and the dancers had to bow four or five times for the benefit of the applauding faction."

Ross doesn't offer the anecdote solely for amusement but to introduce a key theme that will shape composers over the course of the century and his book. "The Rite of Spring" prophesied "a new type of popular art," he writes. "For much of the 19th century, music had been a theater of the mind; now composers would create a music of the body. Melodies would follow the patterns of speech; rhythms match the energy of dance; musical forms would be more concise and clear; sonorities would have the hardness of life as it is really lived." Music emerged from the palaces and into the streets. As Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, who wove gypsy dance tunes into his riveting string quartets, said, "We must drink our fill not from your silver goblets but from cool mountain springs."

The masterly Bartók's remark cuts to the paradoxical heart of 20th century music. As composers like he and Stravinsky drafted the people's music into their own, the further out of favor their music seemed to fall. Concert halls in the first half of the century were doing a fine business with the lords and ladies, even the artists and bartenders, by presenting a sweet diet of Brahms symphonies and Puccini operas. But as the music incorporated foreign sounds and abandoned lush melodies and harmonies, concertgoers began to rebel. They felt composers had turned their backs on them. And for the most part they were right. But as Ross shows, history was the real culprit. And Arnold Schoenberg.

Next page: I am going toward violence rather than tenderness