Music critic Alex Ross, who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996, is the author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). He’ll be reading selections from his book for San Francisco Performances on Saturday, April 24, at 10 a.m. at Herbst Theatre. Each selection will be followed by Ethan Iverson of (The Bad Plus jazz trio) on piano, in a re-creation of a program Ross and Iverson first presented at the Paris Bar in New York in 2007. (Ross’ blog can be found here and Iverson’s here.)
I was reminded of your book lately while interviewing a composer who spoke of the present time as being a new Golden Age, when someone could not only speak of listening to both, say, Schoenberg and Vaughan Williams, without suffering derision, but possibly hear both on the same program — something almost impossible a few decades ago.
I’ve used the phrase “Golden Age” once or twice ... I think we’re living in just a brilliant period. And not only for the music composed, but for the progressive writing and thinking about music. There’s so much to absorb from the 20th century, now that it’s finished, now that we’ve stepped out from it. The first inklings were in concerts in the ’90s, exciting connections being made that were unthinkable a few years before — a sense of “but why not?”
There were so many forces at play in the 20th century, so many voices to be heard. A pluralistic, tolerant attitude’s important. Each individual composer can’t be completely eclectic, all-absorbing ... they have to go after the sounds they have in their minds, tune out the rest. Listeners and conductors have the obligation — and the opportunity — to experience as many different systems and styles as possible, just to hear what went on.
And the degrees of separation aren’t all that many. What I love to do — and I did it in my book — is show, say, LaMonte Young on the West Coast in the late ’50s, listening to Webern, something of titanic international modernism, and hearing something different: slowing it down, teasing out a slow-moving, repetitive space ... Minimalism! It seemed to happen in an instant: One world brought into another, alien world.
The argument of your book, if I may put it like that, seems to overlap an opposition, common since the ’60s or ’70s, in both academic and popular culture, between populism and elitism.
It’s inescapable. Pop music and pop culture bombarded for all time the stereotype of classical music.
When Beethoven wrote the Ninth [Symphony], he had a vast audience in mind. “Embrace the millions”: I think he meant it literally.
The 20th century was defined within and outside of an elite formalism, an elite strain operated by and for the elite. That often mutated, and became more popular. An art form aimed at the connoisseur found a wider audience.
There’re not any hard and fast answers. There’s danger at both ends: the danger of something meant for just a small circle. But there’s also the danger of populism, of watering a style down, losing its center.
Watch Alex Ross on the Colbert Report
There’s also what happens when the forces that music plays with go out into a big arena. Composers can become disoriented, scared; those who aimed at becoming bigger, iconic figures — like Copland, or Shostakovich, to some extent — go into an alarmed retreat (as Copland did in later life) or the strain on Shostakovich of having the template of being a national figure imposed on him.
It goes back and forth. It really comes down to the individual case for me, the individual composer and his propensities ... In any case, there’s so little control over what the vast audiences somebody may have in mind will receive. Schoenberg was disappointed he wasn’t as popular as he thought he should be.
When [György] Ligeti was composing Aventures, he probably was thinking of a very elite crowd at a European summer music festival. A few years later, millions and millions of people are listening to it on the 2001 soundtrack — a twist of fate Ligeti couldn’t have had in mind.
Yet, despite some tussles with [film director Stanley] Kubrick over what he expected of movie music, Ligeti respected the film. Especially in the stream of images at the end, I think 2001 responded, maybe in an unconscious way, to the level of the music. It took on a mind of its own, a life of its own in the world: a wonderful thing.
You’ve been speaking and writing on concert hall decorum, something particular to different moments in history. What’s the response been like?
It’s a touchy subject. Sometimes when I’ve brought up concert decorum, like the notion that the “no-applause” rule shouldn’t be enforced, some people get upset, feeling if a rule is relaxed a little bit, there will be chaos — people shouting, all hell breaking loose. I don’t feel that danger, but I do understand the feelings of someone who grew up with that decorum, who loves the concert experience as it is. I myself grew up that way.
All I’m trying to do is to hold a conversation, to ask how the rule came up in the first place, an anthropological question, instead of saying, “This is the way it is.”
In fact, history, which is in scattered accounts, indicates it’s a recent invention, more of the 1920s, made general in the ’60s. There are technological factors: people listening to records at home, with little bands of silence, who expect the same thing in the concert hall.
Maybe there’s no one, crisp reason for it. I’m just trying to ask: Is this what we want, if we want to bring new people into the concert hall? To talk about rules obnoxiously, in the language of “Thou Shalt Not,” that’s often printed in programs ...
I go along with Emmanuel Ax, who says that audiences applaud when it’s called for, and don’t when it’s not. They want to applaud when they hear the composer asking for it — and 18th- and 19th-century composers expected, even begged for, applause.
It’s an intuitive relationship, and I think it should be a little more relaxed — not chaotic, like the munching on dinner or wandering in and out of 18th- and 19th-century concert culture. Whatever makes musical sense. I wouldn’t want much applause during Messaien!
There’s no real control over it. We can try to make rules, but it’s what the audience wants ... They’ll get along with the spirit; their cultural antennae will pick it up, in time. There’s nothing wrong with thinking and talking about it. It fascinates me; and you can’t find much that’s scholarly written about it.
You wrote on James Joyce in college, and said you wanted to write a thesis on Strauss’ Salome, which is based on Oscar Wilde’s play. Stendhal once said, “It’s the other arts that brought me to writing.” How do you look at music and writing together?
I’ve been a voracious reader from when I was a kid. I discovered early modern poetry in college — T.S. Eliot, Yeats — and studied that great period of Irish literature — Shaw, Yeats, Beckett — which obviously has a musicality. Also, Wallace Stevens, who is incredibly musical. That’s my secular bible. I keep it on my desk. When I’m uninspired, I pick up Stevens to help me push beyond.
But that musicality is purely verbal. It’s a tricky connection, with music itself. I often struggle with musical settings of writing I love. And I struggle with a fanatic relationship to the original texts! Settings of both Yeats and Joyce have been attempted, with mixed success. Wilde, in the case of Salome, is much different. I think Strauss was responding to beautiful language, but also to Wilde’s wonderful juxtapositions, when he set its German translation — by Mike Nichols’ grandmother, a peculiar twist of 20th-century history! — mirroring grandiose Wagnerian sonorities as well as jazzy skittering in Herod’s music ...
Up until the moment I started writing, I considered music and writing separate spheres. I made very little attempt to write about music, feeling it wasn’t a realistic way to pursue making a living. After college, a couple people persuaded me to start writing about music. I found my identity as a writer; up until then, I had not found an object for my skills. It really clicked. Style paired with a sense of urgency, a mission — not just the ability to write, but something to say.
I started writing about two things: 20th-century and New Music, because I felt it was neglected, and wanted to see what I could do to shine a light on it; and classical music in general, as there were so few my age knowledgeable about it ... to do my bit, write to get people’s attention and focus it on the music itself.
So you see yourself as an advocate of the music?
That’s an important part of the job description. Some think a critic can’t — or shouldn’t — be serving both objectivity and subjectivity. Objectivity is so hard to achieve. But beyond that, there’s so little discussion at a wider level. A critic writing for a wide circulation like The New Yorker has the obligation — and the opportunity — to speak to that audience, who are maybe curious about the music, but baffled about where to begin.
I think our Classical Voice readers would be interested in what music you listen to at home.
A little bit of everything. Most of the time, classical, for both professional and private enjoyment. (Though there’s never that very much; always a stack of CDs for my next assignment.) Jogging or on the plane, I listen to the great pop musicians. My passion’s for Bob Dylan, Bjork, Radiohead ... not coincidentally, those I wrote pieces on for The New Yorker, which will be out in my new collection Listen to This in the fall of 2010, with newer work.
I didn’t grow up listening to popular music at all. I was a hard-core classical geek until I branched out in college. At first, I liked more dissonant stuff: Sonic Youth, Cecil Taylor. Now I like Duke Ellington. I’ve been listening to Nina Simone. I turned 40 a couple of years ago; it’s more difficult to keep up with new pop music. I do like Joanna Newsom, who’s from California ... and Sufjan Stevens ...
I don’t know whether you can call it “rock” anymore. A lot of people studied classical; you hear that all the time in indie music. There should be awareness of that when creating concerts ...
Still, I grew up on classical music, and feel most comfortable with it; I feel it’s my home ground.
And I have great respect for jazz; there’s not much about it in my book. It’s a hugely important subject. That’s why I love the little idea I came up with, with Ethan Iverson, first in 2007, that we’ll be doing for San Francisco Performances: reading passages from my book, then Ethan playing piano. There was a lot of this in the 1920s, on the roof of the Hotel St. Rita, with Paul Bowles next to Duke Ellington, and at the Bœuf Sur le Toit in Paris. Ethan comes from the jazz world, with a knowledge of the classical world ... His mind makes connections I wouldn’t, takes Babbitt and Ligeti and brings swing to them. It’s a revelation to me.