Ross Alex. The rest is noice

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Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous

awards for his work, including two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music

criticism, a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a Fleck

Fellowship from the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American

Music Center for significant contributions to the field of contemporary music.

The Rest Is Noise is his first book.

ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR

THE REST IS NOISE

LOS ANGELES TIMES FAVORITE BOOK OF 2007

FORTUNE MAGAZINE TOP 5 BOOK OF THE YEAR

SLATE MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF 2007

A NEW YORK MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF 2007

“Ross is one of the most elegant, poetic, and humorous voices in the world of

music criticism today…. [He] grasps music on a profound, composerlike level,

and that mastery allows him to rise above dry analysis to describe music as

possessing physical as well as aural characteristics…. But what truly sets Noise

apart is its depth. Time and again, Ross finds ways to distill comprehensible

themes out of vast and potentially mind-boggling material.”

—Zachary Lewis, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“Coolly magisterial … The Rest Is Noise tells the story of twentieth-century

music in completely fresh and unblinkered ways.”

—-Jeremy Eichler, The Boston Globe

“There seems always to have been a ‘crisis of modern music,’ but by some

insane miracle one person finds the way out. The impossibility of it gives me

hope. Fast-forwarding through so many music-makers’ creative highs and lows

in the company of Alex Ross’s incredibly nourishing book will rekindle anyone’s

fire for music.”

—Björk

“What powers this amazingly ambitious book and endows it with authority are

the author’s expansive curiosity and refined openness of mind.… Ross’s

erudition and grasp of the highbrow curriculum is unquestionable, but what sets

him apart from most music critics is the familiar ease with which he also

addresses jazz and rock, film and television. His is a sweet and generous

voice.”

—Jamie James, Los Angeles Times

“A sprawling tour de force… Ross writes so engagingly and evocatively that the

tale flows, and the spirit of the music shines through.”

—Fred Kaplan, Slate

“Just occasionally someone writes a book you’ve waited your life to read. Alex

Ross’s enthralling history of twentieth-century music is, for me, one of those

books.”

—Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian (UK)

“A reader who has always heard that classical music is dead must first be

convinced that it is alive. No critic at work today does this better than Alex

Ross.… Mr. Ross brings his gift for authoritative enthusiasm to a whole

century’s worth of music.… A massively erudite book that takes care to wear its

learning lightly.”

—Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun

“In his stunning narrative, visionary music critic Alex Ross comes closer than

anyone to describing the spellbinding sensations music provokes.”

—Blair Tindall, Financial Times

“An impressive, invigorating achievement… This is the best general study of a

complex history too often claimed by academic specialists on the one hand and

candid populists on the other. Ross plows his own broad furrow, beholden to

neither side, drawing on both.”

—Stephen Walsh, The Washington Post

“One of the great books of 2007… A masterwork about an immensely important

subject… Ross is revelatory on so many subjects—the Nazis and music, Stalin

and music.… There are times, in fact, when this exceptional history is jaw-

dropping.”

—The Buffalo News (Editor’s Choice)

“Alex Ross turns out to be a brilliant chronicler of the combative, often stiflingly

doctrinaire twentieth century.… He describes the period’s music, much of which

still bewilders listeners, with a vividness and enthusiasm that make you want to

hear it immediately.… The Rest Is Noise does no less than restore human

agency to music history.”

—Gavin Borchert, Seattle Weekly

“A towering accomplishment—an essential book for anyone trying to

understand and appreciate one of the most fertile and explosive centuries in the

history of classical music… A genuine page-turner… A fresh, eloquent, and

superbly researched book.”

—Kyle MacMillan, The Denver Post

“With every page you turn, the story departs further from the old fairy tale of

giants bestriding the earth and looks more like the twentieth century we

remember, with fallible human beings reacting to, reflecting, and affecting with

symbolic sounds a flux of conditions and events created by other fallible human

beings. And turn the pages you do. A remarkable achievement.”

—Richard Taruskin, author of

The Oxford History of Western Music

“Deeply readable musical history… What distinguishes Noise is [Ross’s] ability

to weave the century’s cataclysms into a single, compelling narrative.… The

book reads like a novel.”

—David Stabler, The Oregonian

“Impressive… Mr. Ross has a gift for black humor, and his language is often

colorful.”

—Olin Chism, The Dallas Morning News

“Comprehensive, imaginatively wrought, insightfully informative, and vastly

entertaining.”

—Jed Distler, Gramophone

“Alex Ross has produced an introduction to twentieth-century music that is also

an absorbing story of personalities and events that is also a history of modern

cultural forms and styles that is also a study of social, political, and

technological change. The Rest Is Noise is cultural history the way cultural

history should be written: a single strong narrative operating on many levels at

once. What more do you want from a book? That it be intelligently, artfully, and

lucidly written? It’s those things, too.”

—Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club

“In The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross shows himself to be a surpassingly eloquent

advocate for beauty, by any means necessary.”

—Terry Teachout, Commentary

“Ross’s achievement is all the more astounding because it makes music

essential to the understanding of history beyond the history of the music itself.

And what could matter more than that?”

—Jonathan Rabb, Opera News

“Lively and at times dramatic… This rich and engrossing history is highly

recommended.”

—Library Journal

“Nuanced, complex in its conceptions, and insightfully original… Dramatic,

erudite, and culturally expansive, this book makes fresh connections that

narrate the story of twentieth-century music in an original way. Ross has written

an important work.”

—Johanna Keller, Chamber Music

THE

REST

NOISE

LISTENING TO

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

ALEX ROSS

Picador

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

New York

Printed in the United States of America. For information,

address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.picadorusa.com

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For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, please contact Picador.

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is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and

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under license from Pan Books Limited.

readinggroupguides@picadorusa.com

Portions of this book originally appeared, in different form, in

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following

material: Excerpt from “Art for Art’s Sake” from

The New Yorker.

The Cradle Will Rock.

Used by permission of the Estate of Marc Blitzstein.

“Battle Cry” by Milton Babbitt. Used by permission of the author.

Excerpt from letter of September 1934 to Israel Citkowitz, by Aaron Copland.

Used by permission of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42771-9

ISBN-10: 0-312-42771-9

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First Picador Edition: October 2008

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my parents

and

Jonathan

It seems to me … that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to

display, it belongs to a world of spirits, for whose absolute reliability in matters

of human reason and dignity I would not exactly want to put my hand in the fire.

That I am nevertheless devoted to it with all my heart is one of those

contradictions which, whether a cause for joy or regret, are inseparable from

human nature.

—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

HAMLET:

…—the rest is silence.

HORATIO:

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

[March within.]

Why does the drum come hither?

CONTENTS

Preface

Where to Listen

PART I: 1900–1933

1. The Golden Age: Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siècle

2. Doctor Faust: Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality

3. Dance of the Earth: The Rite, the Folk, le Jazz

4. Invisible Men: American Composers from Ives to Ellington

5. Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius

6. City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties

PART II: 1933–1945

7. The Art of Fear: Music in Stalin’s Russia

8. Music for All: Music in FDR’s America

9. Death Fugue: Music in Hitler’s Germany

PART III: 1945–2000

10. Zero Hour: The U.S. Army and

German Music, 1945–1949

11. Brave New World: The Cold War and

the Avant-Garde of the Fifties

12. “Grimes! Grimes!”: The Passion of Benjamin Britten

13. Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and

the Avant-Garde of the Sixties

14. Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists

15. Sunken Cathedrals: Music at Century’s End

Epilogue

Notes

Suggested Listening

Acknowledgments

Index

PREFACE

In the spring of 1928, George Gershwin, the creator of Rhapsody in Blue,

toured Europe and met the leading composers of the day. In Vienna, he called

at the home of Alban Berg, whose blood-soaked, dissonant, sublimely dark

opera Wozzeck had had its premiere in Berlin three years earlier. To welcome

his American visitor, Berg arranged for a string quartet to perform his Lyric

Suite, in which Viennese lyricism was refined into something like a dangerous

narcotic.

Gershwin then went to the piano to play some of his songs. He hesitated.

Berg’s work had left him awestruck. Were his own pieces worthy of these

murky, opulent surroundings? Berg looked at him sternly and said, “Mr.

Gershwin, music is music.”

If only it were that simple. Ultimately, all music acts on its audience through the

same physics of sound, shaking the air and arousing curious sensations. In the

twentieth century, however, musical life disintegrated into a teeming mass of

cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon. Some genres

have attained more popularity than others; none has true mass appeal. What

delights one group gives headaches to another. Hip-hop tracks thrill teenagers

and horrify their parents. Popular standards that break the hearts of an older

generation become insipid kitsch in the ears of their grandchildren. Berg’s

Wozzeck is, for some, one of the most gripping operas ever written; Gershwin

thought so, and emulated it in Porgy and Bess, not least in the hazy chords that

float through “Summertime.” For others, Wozzeck is a welter of ugliness. The

arguments easily grow heated; we can be intolerant in reaction to others’ tastes,

even violent. Then again, beauty may catch us in unexpected places.

“Wherever we are,” John Cage wrote in his book Silence, “what we hear is

mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it

fascinating.”

Twentieth-century classical composition, the subject of this book, sounds like

noise to many. It is a largely untamed art, an unassimilated underground. While

the splattered abstractions of Jackson Pollock sell on the art market for a

hundred million dollars or more, and while experimental works by Matthew

Barney or David Lynch are analyzed in college dorms across the land, the