Making Sense of a Century

Brett Campbell on October 16, 2007
For more than a decade, New Yorker classical-music critic Alex Ross has been showing readers why music composed in the last century — and last week — matters. Still safely under 40 and a fan of Radiohead, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, and Björk, as well as Aaron Copland and John Adams, Ross has never succumbed to the institutional elitism, insularity, and conservatism that have pushed many potential listeners away. Ross’ new book, The Rest Is Noise, published this month by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, extends that broad perspective — in addition to his storyteller’s gift for the engaging anecdote, humor, and evocative description — to the 20th century’s kaleidoscopic, tumultuous non-pop-musical history. He’ll be discussing and reading from his book this week at events in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Marin (see below for more details). Along with his erudite yet easily accessible New Yorker column, Ross has been a pioneer in staking out a claim in the classical music blogosphere; for the past three years, www.therestisnoise.com, originally conceived as an adjunct to the book, has showcased Ross’ sly humor and outtakes from his regular gig and the book. “It turns out that my blog and others have filled this hunger for a national conversation about classical music, which is pretty much shut out of national magazines, and is generally shabbily treated in mainstream American culture — in contrast to 50 or 60 years ago when [Arturo] Toscanini and [Leonard] Bernstein were stars on radio and TV," he says. "Now my blog seems to write itself — I get so many suggestions from readers, links to things that are kind of weird, and fascinating stories from all over.”

Context and Anecdote

Ross’ dual perspectives of journalist and historian equip him with an ideal view of our own messy artistic and social milieu. Although the shelf of 20th-century music histories is a long one, many of those books are written by academics for other scholars. Others, particularly those by European writers, tend to portray the story of music as an evolution toward greater freedom from tonality, pulse, and — not incidentally — audiences. In this cramped view, musical development reaches its zenith in the unlistenable works of a few thorny European composers; world music, pop influences, and American composers are at best footnotes. Ross, a college history major, wanted “to take a step back and write in a broader way about the music and the century,” and The Rest Is Noise is replete with surprising insights gleaned from the literature, politics, and events of the time in which the music was composed. “I felt there was an opening for a book that took on the subject in a much more general way — the personalities of composers, cultural and social context, the whole surrounding clamor of events in 20th-century music,” he told SFCV in an interview. “Whether you call it cultural history or intellectual history, I wanted to show where this music came from and how it hit the world.” The book benefits from Ross’ ability, honed in his New Yorker column, to reach intellectually curious general readers without resorting to score excerpts, musical notation, or (many) Italian terms. “I’ve developed a way of negotiating this issue of how technical can you get,” he explains. “I find I can go into some detail about a particular musical moment as long as I don’t go on too long and as long as I choose language carefully. By accompanying a technical term with the right metaphor — like calling a cluster chord ‘forbiddingly dense’ — I can give people an immediate sense of what emotional heft is carried by, say, the Tristan chord.” While always keeping the emotional significance of a work in view, he also supplies enough technical detail to give readers a sense of the significance of developments, such as the 12-tone method. As he notes, every genre, including sportswriting, has its technical language, and chroniclers are always engaged in a balancing act. Along with his penchant for apposite metaphors and colorful, unexpected adjectives (no doubt developed during his years at The New York Times, whose critics seem to specialize in them), Ross knows a good illustrative anecdote can engage casual readers far more easily than even the most trenchant analysis. He puts the story back in music history. Each section of the book opens with a short narrative that allows Ross to illustrate a major theme of that period. For example, a 1906 encounter in Graz among Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and perhaps even Adolf Hitler provides the jumping-off point for a discussion of the end of Romanticism, the rise of modernism, atonality, and much else. “There’s this amazing cast of characters — Hitler, Stalin, J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedys, the Beatles, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground,” that most influential of rock bands whose story is deeply tied up with the birth of minimalism. “If you just take the story of each of these representative composers and follow them from beginning to end, you move across an incredibly varied landscape,” Ross explains. “And that sends the message that this music was not off in a ghetto by itself, even though some may have tried to escape the surrounding reality.” The book uses extended stories about composers — often those undervalued in some earlier histories such as Shostakovich, Britten, and Copland — to open the door to trenchant insights about many of the major issues arising in the music of the last century, especially the big one: How, in the collision of the impulses to venerate the past while seeking the future, the classical tradition diverged from popular taste. Although his own tastes span the range of accessibility from Adès to Adams, Ross doesn’t take the simple tack of just blaming modernism; in fact, he finds much of value in the music of Schoenberg, for example, while at the same time decrying the ideological stances that condemned composers like Copland, Britten, and Sibelius for being insufficiently inaccessible.

A Pop Sensibility

But Ross also understands that the story of the decline of classical music in the 20th century isn’t a simplistic tale with villainous, mustache-twirling “progressive” modernists vanquishing “conservative” populists. For instance, he notes, as has historian Joseph Horowitz, that the failure of the classical music establishment to support new American music between the two world wars, thanks to the rise of the cult of the conductor and worship of music’s Romantic era, left a vacuum in which listeners turned to the amazing pop music of the era to find something that spoke to contemporary concerns. If Ross has a philosophy, it’s anti-ideological. The heroes of Ross’ book are those creative artists who engage with their societies, by choice or otherwise, as with Shostakovich’s long, shaky tiptoe along the line dividing official approval and the gulag. They not only come away with great material for music, but they also provide entertaining fodder for historians. Sometimes, Ross himself admits, he chose anecdotes for their sheer whimsicality and weirdness (Schoenberg and Stravinsky’s separate adventures in the New World, including barbecue restaurants and junior tennis, for example). They usually produce a much richer, better-rounded portrait of complex figures, such as Schoenberg, whom lesser histories reduce to caricature. Such stories help demonstrate how music, like any art form, is always a product of its time and place. Composers weren’t “brains in a vat,” he says, and almost every time he introduces one, Ross tells us what the composer’s father did for a living. “It’s striking how many came from lower-middle-class backgrounds,” he says, citing Debussy, Schoenberg, Mahler, Janáček, and Copland. This tactic also combats the prevalent notion that “classical music is an elite art form populated by the rich.” Ross hopes that his book, like his column, reaches beyond the cozy coterie of classical music mavens and out to the unwashed barbarians who dare to find art in the music of the Beatles or Björk. “In college, I discovered the noisier end of rock through the classical avant-garde and free jazz, which bore a close resemblance to the avant-garde end of rock,” he recalls. “[Pop music listeners] may be able to discover classical music along the same path but moving in the opposite direction. “When I was writing the book, I very often had in mind people who’d grown up with pop music and developed a passion about some of the more out-of-the-way noncommercial areas of pop music and who might be curious about the 20th-century classical repertory that so often feeds into that music — from Duke Ellington taking an interest in Debussy and Ravel to Charlie Parker and Coltrane listening closely to Stravinsky to the Beatles putting Stockhausen on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s and being influenced by his electronic collage procedures on their later, trippier songs, to bands of today such as Sonic Youth and Radiohead and Joanna Newsom, Sufjan Stevens, and Björk, who knew 20th-century music quite well and studied it in school. It’d be great if people picked up this book and followed that story back in time and found out where this music came from.”

State of the Art

In fact, Ross believes that younger fans and musicians from the classical and pop traditions are starting to find common ground. Commendably determined to escape Manhattan-centrism, Ross has investigated various European music scenes and recently took off on a journey through America to assess the state of regional orchestras. And in the current, fervid online conversation about the health of classical music, he comes down on the optimistic side. “People have been predicting the demise of classical music for decades now,” Ross says. “In a way it depends on where you are. Some of the orchestras really are in a serious state, facing falling audiences. Others seem to be thriving — the L.A. Philharmonic is doing amazing things and getting a great response. On major labels, classical music is much diminished but all these indie labels are growing by leaps and bounds. “Young musicians are coming up who are alert and imaginative and feel a great urge to communicate their love of the music, but they don’t feel a sense of entitlement that some earlier generations have had,” he says. “They’re used to growing up in a culture that generally pays very little attention to classical music, but they don’t see it as a crisis; they see it as a challenge: How can we engage with this culture? And they’re coming up with these fantastic ideas.” He cites Michigan’s Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, which has worked with Steve Reich, played his music at the composer's home base in New York, and used the Internet creatively to reach surprisingly large audiences. “Smaller-scale organizations, string quartets, and new-music ensembles — there’s so much happening across the country, more than ever in a way, but it’s not being talked about on a national level,” Ross insists. “So the Internet has allowed this conversation to happen without editors passing judgment on whether classical music is of interest to the 18-24 male demographic. “These kinds of things are springing up everywhere. With the Internet now, people can become informed and listen to samples in way that would have been difficult a few years ago. With the right kind of canny outreach, you can find the hidden audience that is present even in relatively small cities.” The Rest Is Noise suggests that the salvation of ambitious music may lie in this kind of technologically assisted, healthy diversity — through avoiding the ideological extremes of the last century, and embracing the eclecticism that has always inspired creative artists. “Everyone needs to have a spirit of adventure and be open to the really multifarious nature of the art form right now," Ross says, "and not try to define it and put it in a box.”
Alex Ross appears in discussion with John Rockwell and Linda Ronstadt on Oct. 17 at 8 p.m. at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco through City Arts & Lectures; on Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Auditorium, presented by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Cal Performances; and on Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. at Book Passage in Corte Madera. More information about his book, including sound samples and his recommended playlists of 20th-century music, are available at www.therestisnoise.com.