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The subject of the book is simply too vast, too complex, too faceted to write a simple book on 20th century serious (and even popular) music, and come away with a full understanding of the subject. That is why this subject should better be taught in a classroom and not by simply picking up a book on the subject. A good reading requires some minimal understanding of harmony, I believe.
Ross, who is without a doubt a very knowledgeable writer and critic, would have been much better served to break his tome up into smaller, more digestible and more complete accountings. My particular difficulty was not being able to listen to Ross's descriptions of various works, many of which I've heard and others which I have never had a chance to listen to. Rather, Mr.
In sum, I would think this book could be a great template for a college level music appreciation course. It would have been wonderful to have a set of CDs included to hear for myself what he describes in words. On the other hand, if one wants to see the progress of modern music, starting with Richard Wagner and those giants who followed him, this is the place to start one's trek through the last 150 years of serious Western music.
I found myself wanting to compare my own views with his. This book is
This book contains more than twice as much material about Sibelius as it does about Bartok, Webern, or Boulez. Three times more than about Hindemith or Stockhausen. Put another way, it has more references to Sibelius than to (combined) Carter, Xenakis, Nono, Babbitt, Berio, Crumb, Dallapiccola, Dutilleux, Ferneyhough, Henze, Kurtag, Lachenmann, Martinu, Penderecki, Poulenc, Sciarrino, and Schnittke. It's that kind of book.But you do get the smug New Yorker-ish assurance that "I know what I like" is a valid, intellectually respectable position in dismissing the music of our time.
You also may feel (am I imagining this). The rediscovery continues. I realize that it may be a reaction to the affinity of Hitler's regime with Romantic music in general and with Wagner in particular; denazification was quite instrumental in this process. The more I read, the less I understood the almost total prevalence of atonal music on the West from the mid 40's through the middle 70's. In Part III (1945-2000) we are witness to multiple movements: the culmination of atonality (Boulez and Darmstadt School), the further break with tradition (Cage, Stockhausen), islands of tonality (Britten, Shostakovich), minimalism (Riley, Glass, Reich) and the post-romantic tradition in Eastern Europe (Schnittke, Pärt, Lutoslawski). The book not only provides a broad panorama of music of 20-th century, but it also goes into the atmosphere behind the changes in musical style.
Part I (1900 - 1933) starts at the turn of the 20-th century with culmination of the Romantic tradition (Mahler, Strauss, and early Schoenberg). This brief synopsis does not do the book justice. The style is lucid even for a layman like me. Personally speaking, In music I am an unrepentant lover of the late romantics' (Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss), and their followers (Elgar, Shostakovich). Part II (1933-1945) continues with music in a politically charged time: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia (Shostakovich), and FDR America (Copland). You may feel the author's passion: more pages are devoted to music that is closer it to author's taste (e.g. Here is a partial list:Messiaen - "Des Canyons aux Etoiles" Gubaidulina - "Offertorium" Pärt - "Credo", "Für Alina"Berio - "Sinfonia"Ligetti - "Horn Trio"Kurtag - "Stele"Adams - "Nixon in China" (full opera) Finally, the unexpected bonus. The author, Alex Ross, is a well known music critic, whose articles appear regularly in The New Yorker.
The book has received a lot of critical acclaim: it won a National Book Critics Circle, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. ('Lonely' Sibelius does not fit nicely into this scheme). I read most of his books (including "Doctor Faustus") and they had a very strong impression on me at the time. the author's confusion in the direction music took after the World War II. I found some pieces of music from the first half of 20-th century that I've added to my queue ("Der Ferne Klang" by Schreker, Complete "Lyric Suite" by Berg, "Symphony #1" by Popov, some Stravinsky works), but overall there were surprisingly few.
It is difficult to write a book about music without supplementary music CDs. The novel has had a tremendous impact on many young composers, and Alex Ross found it to be the great literary compliment in his discussion of music of 20th century. But this was a LONG time ago. Additionally, there was no change in my attitude towards atonal music. (Apparently, according to Alex Ross, it is still the same in today's Germany). Particularly the late Romantics.b) See whether the book may generate a spark for listening to and the appreciation of pure atonal compositions.c) The same as the first item but for the second half of the century and without romantic constraints.
on all contemporary music, including the composers that maintain tonality in their music (Schnittke, Adams, Ades, etc). The biographies of well known (and not so well known) composers together with analysis of their essential works are provided. The book consists of three Parts. Anything goes as long as the framework is primarily tonal.Answers to first two items were primarily negative.
Nevertheless, I read The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century with great interest in relatively short time. But to such degree and for so long. Berg, Britten, Adams). The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn" (1947) (Doctor Faustus (Everyman's Library)) is mentioned in "Rest is Noise" multiple times. The late Thomas Mann novel "Doctor Faustus. It is even harder if the subject of the book is music of 20-th century, and the book is quite comprehensive (704 pages). This is above me.The answer for the third item was definitely positive, and it has fully justified the negative response to the first two questions.
There are few composers completely unknown to me (Kurtag), but there are MANY works that I've put in my queue and plan to listen in the near future. There were three items on my agenda before I've started reading "The Rest is Noise":a) Discover composers who wrote in the first half of the 20-th century who were previously unknown to me. Pure atonal music does not make an emotional impact on me (there are few exceptions; Webern is one of them). Perhaps because I am not a music professional, I am in no position to appreciate the honesty, rigor and mathematical beauty of serial musical compositions. Ross shows how its majestic, apparently invincible structure starts to crumble under multiple influences: Debussy's impressionist movement, the rhythms of Stravinsky ("Rite of the Spring"), the impact of jazz (Gershwin, Milhaud, Ravel), and most of all by the break with tonality (Second Viennese School: Schoenberg, Berg, Webern).
Thomas Mann is the most musical writer I know. But "Der Zeit Ihre Kunst" (any particular age has its own art), and Alex Ross does an excellent job showing the impact of new music (Cage, etc). I am quite interested in contemporary music as long as it is primarily tonal (Britten, Schnittke, minimalism, etc). The history of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn can be viewed as a microcosm of the intellectual and musical history of Europe (particularly Germany) in the first half of the 20th century. It seems like the right time to reread and rethink this novel again.
Schoenberg is actually an American - his Austrian origins are a mere accident. A clever title. Boulez is mentioned at length because he worked in the US, and in the case of Messiaen one has the impression that Mr. So far so good. and Copland, then Cage (in many respects a simple provocateur but introduced here as hero.)., and, as THE climax, to the minimalist light-music composers who are acclaimed to be the last ones to provoke a pseudo-scandal with the use of too much tonality (a ridiculous comparison with the Sacre-scandal.). Not that a book on a subject like this could avoid any tendency but it is obvious that Mr. Sibelius is the fig leaf in this context so that things shall not be too obvious.
Ross tries to re-write the history of 20th Century music in order to inhance the status of Anglo-American music. The book sadly has a clear tendency. This is the good right of an American author if he has reasonable arguments. Eurocentrism should not be replaced by another centrism.
It is very easy to find the silver lining of this book - very entertaining, very broad, very bright; the interplay between music and politics is, sometimes, described in a very original way (Strauß, Copland, the post-war Avantgarde in Europe). But the whole story line beginning with Mahler in New York (those people appreciated him)., going on with the talk between Berg and Gershwin (two great composers)., American music life (original from the beginning. - no reference to all the Germans, working as composition teachers), Ives (an amateur hailed as giant). - - this whole story line serves as apotheosis of Anglo-American music. Ross knows that. The whole book is spoiled by this, and this is a pity. But not only from the European point of view, there are some major drawbacks. Ross appreciates him mainly due to his composition inspired by American canyons.
But this encomium of Anglo-American music is sung with such verve and the picture is distorted to such an extent that one must use the ugly word propaganda.For instance, the chapter on Britten is completely disproportionate, and Mr. In the Foreword, he argues innocently that he only wants to point on Britten's music as a music which should also be heard - but the chapter inevitably has a major impact. And so on.There could be other critical comments but I decided to focus on this topic because I feel that also Anglo-American readers should be embarrassed by this onesidedness. We have to wait for a new, more differentiated and balanced book on 20th Century music.
His descriptions of the difficulties faced by some German composers under Naziism, or composers like Shostakovich and Prokoviev under Stalinism, are heart-rending.What is even more extraordinary is that when you read him describing the kinds of music no one would call toe-tapping or singable (the Second Viennese School, or composers like Milton Babbitt and George Crumb in post-war America, you really wish you had a disk and a player to hear these works that you might otherwise have ignored. Ross's book is essentially a musico-cultural history of the Western 20th century (he leads off with Strauss's Salome, and carries it all the way through to the latest sounds coming out of New York, France, Germany, etc. Precisely because of these social and cultural contexts, Ross's work is a long way from the kind of old fashioned musical history which contents itself simply with the influence of composer A on composer B and C, and so forth, as if they all lived in vacuums. in 2000). A cultural history because he situates the music in its contexts, be it pre-first world war Vienna, Weimar Germany, Britain after Elgar, the US in the 1930s and succeeding decades, and so forth. He has his likes and dislikes (Boulez and Stockhausen don't seem to be among his favorites), but he measure their work and their importance with great fairness. There is one rather extraordinary (I thought) omission and that is any attempt to measure the musical culture and productivity of Italy, He may well believe that the country disappeared into the background after, say, Puccini was gone; but it would have been interesting to know why that was the case (and one can't just blame it on Fascism, given the musical productivity of far worse regimes, like Nazi Germay and the Communist Soviet Union).
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