Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2544 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Times Literary Supplement
'Puts the history back into music and the music back into history.'

Classical Music
A masterly writer...A remarkable book.'

Prospect
'There is so much in it that is good...it will be a work of cultural importance.'

Customer Reviews

Over-hyped perhaps?
This has been the subject of a great deal of hype but (perhaps because of that) I found I didn't enjoy it very much. Anyone looking for something as crisply written and as intellectually stimulating as, say, The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes is likely to be disappointed. It's a curiously baggy and unfocussed book, which perhaps reflects some of the difficulties surrounding modern music and its reception among the cultured classes, where it's OK not to know Schoenberg's Five Pieces For Orchestra, but not OK not to know The Waste Land; OK to not know Elliott Carter but not OK not to know Jackson Pollock; where a person might reasonably be expected to have read Wittgenstein's Tractatus but no one is expected to have listened to Le marteau sans maitre It's difficult to imagine a work like this about literature or the fine arts being welcomed so ecstatically.

It seems as if the author unsure who his real audience might be. Much of the first half for instance is made up of potted biographies of composers. These are all very well but that's all they are: potted biographies - the kind of thing most music lovers have already gleaned from sleeve notes. And while Ross is busy making us "at home" with his chosen composers he is neglecting to write about the one thing that makes them interesting - the music that was their life's work. Of course he can write well about music, often very well. There's a marvellous page about the end of Jenufa; he writes feelingly about Berg; and there is an excellent chapter "Beethoven was Wrong" on contemporary American minimalism.

But there are also strange lapses. Benjamin Britten is obviously someone Ross admires both as a man and as a musician, yet he has curious way of showing it. The reader is treated to pedestrian slog through Peter Grimes, a crushingly detailed plot synopsis with musical footnotes, and then an even more dispiriting trudge through Death in Venice. The choice of works has a superficial logic to it - the two operas bracket a career and enable Ross to talk about Britten's homosexuality - but the writing conveys little of the excitement and special atmosphere of this music, while sidelining The Turn of the Screw which many consider Britten's masterpiece.

Anyone thunderstruck by Birtwistle's Mask of Orpheus or Carter's Symphony for Three Orchestras, or who has been ravished by some delectable bit of Roberto Gerhard, and wants to know more, or who has seen the DVD of King Priam and wants to explore the rest of Tippett's operas, will find no succour here. Or if you were thinking it was about time to grapple with Skalkottas , Xenakis, Rautavaara or Wolfgang Rihm and were looking for something to help you along, some indication of where to start, the kind of thing you might encounter, or even whether the effort would be worth making, you would look in vain.

The book also has a political bias typical of the time and place of writing - New York in the early years of the 21st century. This means that no progressive movement or endeavour can be mentioned without a condescending sneer. Composers of the thirties and fifties come in for an especially hard time. This is not just irritating, it is also completely a-historical. Even a brief flip through The Road to Wigan Pier or The Grapes or Wrath - to look no further - ought to be enough to show that there were plenty of people in the 1930s who had good reason to have anti-capitalist feelings and that to be against the status quo was not invariably the mark of a dupe or a scoundrel. There is sense too that there is something weird and personal going on when the book swerves aside twice to belabour the Brecht/Eisler The Measures Taken (surely not a very important work in the musical scale of things), characterising it the second time as "terrorist chic". This is a remark which might go down well at a Manhattan dinner party but ought never to have made it into print. Brecht's play is about political activists and labour organisers, not terrorists. The two are not at all the same thing, though perhaps Ross is here angling for a seat on the board of Wal-Mart. (And where, it seems fair to ask, were the much-vaunted fact checkers in all this?). There's some odd ideological wobbling too over European arts subsidy, about which Ross is generally disparaging, while praising the BBC, which he credits for the liveliness of London's new music scene.

The book's biggest disappointment however is that it is unlikely to send the reader rushing to the concert hall or record store to seek out new experiences or back to the CD collection to listen to old favourites with new ears. It's a pity that all the publicity may mean that other, better, more thought-provoking writers about 20th century music are in danger of being overlooked. These include Paul Griffiths (studies of individual composers, collected reviews and his short history of Western music); Andrew Porter (collected reviews); and Charles Rosen (on Schoenberg and Carter). And of course there are many composers who have written brilliantly about their own music and that of their contemporaries, in particular Elliott Carter, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Robin Holloway, Hugh Wood and, certainly not least, Arnold Schoenberg whose essay Brahms the Progressive is almost extravagantly ear-opening. None of these are as comprehensive as The Rest is Noise but they communicate a lot more pleasure and are likely to lead to better listening.

unlikely to help you with that cd storage problem...
Given that whole books could be written about virtually every single composer Alex Ross mentions in this mammoth survey, you'd be forgiven for thinking that 'The Rest is Noise' would be heavy on filler and light on critical insight. Whilst it's fair to say that as the musical world diversifies post-1950, Ross spends less and less time looking at the work of individual composers - this should take nothing away from an astounding work of scholarship.

Like any critic, Ross clearly has his own tastes and prejudices - composition to him is at its best when it addresses a popular audience. It's therefore unsurprising that he devotes more pages to composers such as Mahler, Strauss, Stravinksy, Sibelius and Britten over the 20th century's kookier figures. However, Ross is not simply bolstering the canon - Cage, Feldman, La Monte Young and Harry Partch are all given warm appraisals, even though none of them have been absorbed into the contemporary repertory.

Ross is gifted with a both a keen analytical ear (and eye) and a great generosity of spirit. Whilst he explores the darker totalitarian affiliations of composers such as Strauss, Webern, Orff and Shostakovich, he redeems them all from the blunt considerations of popular myth. In fact the only figure in the whole book who is subject to undisguised contempt is Pierre Boulez. In Ross' account he comes across as an arrogant, two-faced hypocrite - capable of acts of quite atrocious slander towards the very composers who made his work possible (Messiaen, Schoenberg, Stravinsky). It says a lot about Ross, that despite this he still finds time to admire Boulez's 'Marteau sans Maitre'.

Ross writes about music vividly, combining technical analysis with metaphorical explanations - so if, like me, you wouldn't know a tritone if it hit you over the head with a sausage, there's plenty here to provoke and engage. As far as I know, the only book covering similar ground to this is Michael Hall's 'Leaving Home' (written as a companion to the excellent TV series). Hall's book is definitely worth tracking down, even if it is sometimes a little technically abstruse its approach.
Ross' historical approach is enriching and rewarding - this is a rigorously researched book with a deeply humane tone- I don't expect to come across a better work of non-fiction this year.

A missed opportunity
The chaotic development of "classical" music during the twentieth century has long been due an inquest. We need answers to questions such as - how did the strange chains of noises that we have been invited to listen to come about; which of them make any sense; and which of them will people want to listen to in a hundred years' time. Alex Ross has attempted to chart here "the fate of composition in the twentieth century" - roughly the first of the above three questions - and has done so with limited success. His book does not make much of the second or third questions, and more importantly suffers from being heavily flawed on many matters, both general and detailed.
To be fair, the subject is immense. Many publishers would have assembled a team of experts under a project manager to ensure a balanced response. Here we just get Ross' opinion, which inevitably means an enormous loss of balance. He is first a journalist, only second a music critic, and when he tries to interpolate his views on how wider global events impacted the development of composition, the reader faces some bizarre distortions. Occasionally the wider references are useful, such as when Ross traces the roots of Darmstadt to OMGUS, the Office of Military Government, United States. More often they are a distraction or even seriously contentious and disruptive, for example in a lengthy and fundamentally irrelevant section devoted to Hitler's interest in Wagner's music, which could not seriously be held to have had a far-reaching impact upon twentieth-century composition.
Ross is at his best in assessing composers such as Messaien, where there is relatively little journalistic anecdote material to distract him. It is weakest where the side-material carries greatest journalistic "spice" - Schoenberg is introduced with a wildly unlikely story of him as a 74-year-old shouting in a Los Angeles supermarket that he never had syphilis, for example, and Ross gets hopelessly swept away in trying to engage with Britten's interest in boys. As a result Britten gets 35 pages of this 543-page book. By contrast, seminal figures such as Bartok and Janacek each get less than three pages.
I am keen to encourage you to read the book and think for yourself, but to be prepared for many distortions and obstacles. Ross plainly does not understand far too much about the causes of the developments he describes. He entirely misses the huge achievements of Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez, failing importantly to connect with the "why" behind each core Boulez career decision. He wholly misunderstands Shostakovich, belittling the stresses under which he worked and failing to recognise the central achievement of his 15 quartets. Key independent spirits such as Henze and Xenakis barely get mentioned.
At the more detailed level too, lapses rain thick and fast. There is no space here to list even a sample (if I have time I will add a selection in a separate comment) but one aches for the publisher to have insisted on a properly qualified editor.
Despite this, the subject is of real importance and for all its many faults Ross' book is readable and thought-provoking.