The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

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Binding: Hardcover EAN: 9781841154756 ISBN: 184115475X Label: Fourth Estate Ltd Manufacturer: Fourth Estate Ltd Number Of Pages: 624 Publication Date: 2008-03-03 Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd Studio: Fourth Estate Ltd
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Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Brilliant and compelling Comment: I was given this hefty book for Christmas. Five days later I have just finished it, and I've read one of my other Christmas presents in the meantime. Alex Ross is one of the wisest music critics I have read. He appears to have listened to more or less everything and read more or less everything there is to read about the music - and "the music" in this instance consists not just of all the "serious" music composed in the last hundred years but also all of the popular stuff. He is as acute about Sonic Youth, Bjork or Public Enemy as he is about Benjamin Britten or Morton Feldman. Modern music is not much listened to, and part of the virtue of this book is that it suggests a reason why that's so. Part of it has to do with the way modern music went in the middle of the 20th century: the composers started to take pride in writing music that they wanted to be unpopular. "The Rest is Noise" has a moment of sublime comedy early on: the premiere of Richard Strauss' opera "Salome" was a huge success, and Strauss's fellow composer Gustav Mahler was highly perplexed because he thought it was a work of genius, and therefore couldn't understand why the public seemed to like it. I personally am a fan of some of the more more forbidding early modernist composers, and Ross has a refreshing lack of piety towards people I admire, such as Schoenberg and Webern. Ross evidently finds the former to be authoritarian, while he finds it hard to forgive the latter's naive and rather schoolboyish enthusiasm for Hitler. But Ross also blows away a lot of the cultural-war nonsense about modern music, always treating the music itself with far more respect than the nonsense sometimes talked by the composers. Pierre Boulez, for example, comes out of the book like the great composer he is, but also as a mischievous and self-serving troublemaker whose aggression as a young critic almost certainly did more harm than good. Ross is perhaps most sympathetic towards troubled, haunted composers with damaged personalities who faced external difficulties and who didn't always face them with aplomb: Britten, Shostakovich, Sibelius. These are three of the most poignant figures in the book - Britten the gay man haunted by his attraction to underage males, Shostakovich desperately ploughing on under the looming menace of the Soviet system, Sibelius drinking himself into silence. In all cases, Ross has a fantastic ability to make you think that the music is worth listening to. He sends me back to my CD of Britten's "Peter Grimes" with renewed determination. I am not convinced by the sections on minimalism, but neither I think is Ross. There is significantly less fire and intensity in the chapters on Steve Reich and Philip Glass, perhaps because neither of them are very interesting composers. Ross gets noticeably more enthusiastic when he passes on to lesser-listened-to figures such as Morton Feldman, Helmut Lachenmann or Thomas Adés - although there is some fine stuff in appreciation of John Adams, who is hardly obscure. A great book, it seems to me, one which is properly detailed in its coverage of how the music works and why it matters, but which is also completely accessible to the common reader. I wish it were twice as long. Anyone who loves music should read it, and then listen to some of this stuff. Customer Rating: Summary: I thought the book had flaws; but it was still inspiring Comment: I am not quite as ready to praise this book as some other reviewers. The Rest is Noise has had the most amazing reviews, and won several prizes, and maybe that kind of overkill made my expectations too high. But a few things disappointed me: This book has got no overarching narrative, which sometimes leads to a sense of confusion about where you are supposed to be in time and space. It's too bitty; there's not enough focus on particular stories or composers, so that it flies off tangentially a bit too often; it's rather self-congratulatory about "everything America's ever done for classical music"; and skips around in time a bit (Messiaen's Dance to the Music of Time is discussed right after the liberation of Germany?)... I also got bored of too many references to obscure composers, who are mentioned and then instantly disregarded, and then frustrated when he skipped through the entire life of Bartok in about a paragraph. But on the other hand it really has been making me listen to a lot of stuff. Digging out old LPs, going through my CD collection, buying new tracks on itunes. That's because Ross is utterly inspiring when he gets down to actually talking about the music. It made me listen to Sibelius 5 in a whole new way. And Copland's Billy the Kid. And much other stuff. His strong point is explaining the music itself, not drawing character portraits or explaining broader cultural landscapes. When you read about the music while the music is actually playing, it all makes sense. So on balance that's a big vote for this big book. Customer Rating: Summary: Over-hyped perhaps? Comment: 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. Customer Rating: Summary: Not what it could or should have been Comment: I started reading this hefty tome with eager anticipation. I get much pleasure from listening to classical music from the 20th Century and the prospect of getting an overview of this was of great interest. However it really should have been presented as a less of an overview and more of a personal selection. It would be impossible to cover all of the composers and all of the history - the book would need to be many times longer than what we are given. However the focus is rather too limited - there is scant discussion of female composers, very little examination of the influence of non-western forms, too much concentration on American composers. The historical story setting is overly emotional and not particularly well researched. The writing clearly displayed the day job of the author. He really could not extend his writing style beyond that of a newspaper or magazine article. This rather limited his ability to carry us through the massive journey of the twentieth century. There were some good sections - particularly those on Strauss, Mahler and Britten (though that did descend into some rather generalized examinations of attitudes towards homosexuality) - but these were small gems set in a rather muddy background. There was a general confusion between whether he was writing for people who understood the technicalities of musical theory or a less musically-literate audience. This meant it was both too complex and too simple. He is clearly a passionate lover of his chosen topic. He just falls short of what he appeared to have set out to achieve. Customer Rating: Summary: A great read, recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in music Comment: This is a huge subject, and Alex Ross does a great job of covering it. Not everyone will be happy if their pet composer or movement has been tackled only briefly (if at all), but it would be impossible to fit the entire century into a single volume. As a result of reading this I have been moved to listen to Schoenberg and Strauss (esp. the Metamorphosen) for the first time; they are challenging works but rewarding and it has been great to have my musical horizons expanded by reading this book. For me, the book was worth buying for the chapter on Sibelius alone; the passage describing the walk around Ainola and linking it to Sibelius' music is just superb - it sent me straight back to my CD collection to dig out and listen to the symphonies after years of not playing them. Overall that is the most wonderful thing about this book - it inspires you to listen to more music. More Reviews