1 2 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. 3 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 4 “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 5 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 6 THE REST IS NOISE LISTENING TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ALEX ROSS Picador Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York 7 THE REST IS NOISE. Copyright © 2007 by Alex Ross. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.picadorusa.com Picador® For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, please contact Picador. E-mail: is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 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 Designed by Michelle McMillian 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 8 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? 9 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 10 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 [...]... www.therestisnoise.com/audio There you will find streaming samples arranged by chapter, along with links to audio-rich Web sites and other channels of direct access to the music An iTunes playlist of twenty representative excerpts can be found at www.therestisnoise.com/playlist For a glossary of musical terms go to www.therestisnoise.com/glossary 13 Part I 1900–1933 I am ready, I feel free To cleave the. .. Zionism (Theodor Herzl first formulated his vision of a Jewish state after attending a performance of Tannhäuser) The English composer Edward Elgar pored over the Meister’s scores with desperate intensity, writing in his copy of Tristan, “This Book contains … the Best and the whole of the Best of This world and the Next.” Elgar somehow converted the Wagnerian apparatus the reverberating leitmotifs, the. .. the two By the end, the synthesis seems complete: the second theme is orchestrated in the clipped, martial style of the first, as if love were an army on the march Yet there is something strained about this marriage of ideas The movement that follows, a so-called Scherzo, resumes the trudge of the opening, but now in superciliously waltzing three-quarter time A sprawling, songful Andante, in the distant... passage draws its cosmic power from the natural laws of sound If you pluck a string tuned to a low C, then pluck it again while pinching it in half, the tone rises to the next C above This is the interval of the octave Further subdivisions yield intervals of the fifth (C to G), the fourth (G to the next higher C), and the major third (C to E) These are the lower steps of the natural harmonic series, or... smear of tone in the full orchestra At the climax, the head of John the Baptist lies before Salome on a platter Having disturbed us with unheard-of dissonances, Strauss now disturbs us with plain chords of necrophiliac bliss For all the perversity of the material, this is still a love story, and the composer honors his heroine’s emotions The mystery of love,” Salome sings, is greater than the mystery... to mind the “Alma” theme of the Sixth The intermingling of Mahlerian strings and Straussian brass suggests the image of the two composers standing side by side at the peak of their art Perhaps they are back in the hills above Graz, gazing down at the splendor of nature while the world waits for them below The vision passes, as joyful scenes in Strauss tend to do Mists rise; a storm breaks out; the climbers... stumbles over the body of a soldier who has committed suicide; feels cold, feels a wind—there is a hallucination of wings beating the air It’s quiet again; then more wind, more visions The orchestra plays fragments of waltzes, expressionistic clusters of dissonance, impressionistic washes of sound There is a turbulent episode as five Jews in Herod’s court dispute the meaning of the Baptist’s prophecies;... Zarathustra, with an elemental hum the note A whistling in all registers of the strings The note is sustained for fifty-six bars, giving the harmony an eternal, unchanging quality that recalls the opening of Wagner’s Ring There is a Wagnerian strain, too, in the theme of falling fourths that stems from the primeval drone It is the unifying idea of the piece, and when it is transposed to a major key it... incompatible Traveling in the same carriage was the Styrian poet and novelist Peter Rosegger According to Alma, when Mahler voiced his reservations, Rosegger replied that the voice of the people is the voice of God—Vox populi, vox Dei Mahler asked whether he meant the voice of the people at the present moment or the voice of the people over time Nobody seemed to know the answer to that question The younger musicians... doing: this is the music that Herod likes, and it serves as a kitschy foil for the grisliness to come Salome now calls for the prophet’s head, and Herod, in a sudden religious panic, tries to get her to change her mind She refuses The executioner prepares to behead the Baptist in his cistern prison At this point, the bottom drops out of the music A toneless bass-drum rumble and strangulated cries in the . every aspect of modern existence, their work can be depicted only on the largest possible canvas. The Rest Is Noise chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators,. the music. An iTunes playlist of twenty representative excerpts can be found at www.therestisnoise.com/playlist. For a glossary of musical terms go to www.therestisnoise.com/glossary. . above. This is the interval of the octave. Further subdivisions yield intervals of the fifth (C to G), the fourth (G to the next higher C), and the major third (C to E). These are the lower