Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise sets out to be a comprehensive history of classical music in the twentieth century. Ross explains the culture, the geography, the personalities, the context and even the theory in a lucid and interesting way. I particularly enjoyed the stuff on turn of the century Vienna, a milieu I knew a little bit about from the novel The Man Without Qualities. The dynamic between Mahler, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg was fascinating and the five or six pages on the debut of Strauss's opera Salome was brilliant. Like Game 7 of the 1955 World Series, it seems that everyone who was anyone was either there or later claimed to be there. (Ross is skeptical of Hitler's claims to have been in the audience.)
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A lot of the information in the book was eye opening: even after he became famous (but not well off) Philip Glass worked as a plumber and taxi driver, for whatever reason half of all the important American classical composers were gay, Thomas Mann was consistently the most important novelistic influence on composers of the century, and it seems that classical music was only really significant in four cultures: Germany, Russia, France and the US.
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After finishing The Rest Is Noise I still wasn't sure that I understood the formal difference between a musical and an opera (he doesn't discuss any of the famous musicals of the 60s, 70s and 80s) and I think Ross underplays the role of pop music but not, of course, the intellectual's friend - jazz. I was also a bit annoyed that the playlist which the publishers have promised to maintain on their website (and on iTunes) doesn't seem to be working anymore - it would have been handy to read about a composer and then hear an example of their work, but alas it was not to be.
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13 comments:
I was afraid this was going to be a pan, as I have this book but haven't gotten to it.
That's weird about the website. I think this is going to be a problem with print aligned with digital media as things go on.
A good solution for the book An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, was that you could also buy a CD of the music mentioned in the book, selected by Seth himself, and I enjoyed that a lot. But of course CDs are bound to go the way of LPs and cassettes, so I don't know what the more permanent solution.
For sure it's not 'The Cloud'.
Seana
No I liked it. I think his weak areas are film music and maybe the whole musical/opera thing but I thought it was a pretty good book on the whole.
Interestingly the only pop album he really dissects is possibly my favourite of all time: The Velvet Underground and Nico.
I don't know a lot about film music, but I remember Anthony Burgess pretty much dissing it in Earthly Powers. I don't know what character got a job writing film music, but it wasn't a good thing--kind of second rate. I know Burgess knew a bit about music himself, though I'm not sure he was right about this.
Seana
I don't think I could wade through Earthly Powers again to find out. It was an OK read at the time, but all those debates about Catholicism versus Anglicanism, the stuff about miracles, guilt etc. its very much a period piece isnt it? Greene and Burgess were endlessly fascinated by their own Anglo Catholicism but now it all seems rather pointless.
I read it at someone else's suggestion and that is one of the few things I remember about it.
One of things I remember about it, because it made sense to me at the time was that one of the main characters--the priest?--had learned a lot of languages because he felt it was just what you needed to do. It was one of those things that I thought was admirable without the slightest sense of how you would go about doing it. I mean, if you weren't Anthony Burgess.
I read it and liked it, but also thought it limited in many respects.
The outlet for classical music is in film soundtracks which don't get appreciated enough.
You mentioned Philip Glass. A great man. Every October around Halloween we listen to a selection of homemade seasonal CDs which include his soundtrack for Joseph Conrad's THE SECRET AGENT. Brilliantly moody, introspective, and noir.
By the way, if you haven't already done so, you should introduce yourself to Largehearted Boy, a very friendly guy whose very popular site offers free downloads, reviews, and a number of other good things.
He is always letting authors promote their books by talking about the music they were listening to at the time they were writing.
You might have already been there for all I know. His blog moves faster than I can follow it. He is here:
http://blog.largeheartedboy.com/
Seana
Burgess's attitude towards learning languages was very unEnglish (or unAmerican come to that). I admire it. I dont know quite how many he got in the end but I think it was well into double figures. Almost as impressive as Sir Richard Francis Burton.
Richard
Yes I felt that film soundtracks could have been given greater scope in the book.
Even Glass's film work barely gets a mention and that's some of his most impressive stuff. And if you're discussing minimalism why not throw in the score for A Thin Red Line for example?
The other thing that I think was in that book, though I can't prove it, was the idea that the way of story turns out depends very much where you decide to artificially end it. I am not sure that he said so explicitly that all stories end with death if left to run long enough. It probably isn't a very original idea, but it was new to me at the time.
Oh, great. I just looked up the summary on Wikipedia and discovered that Burgess deliberately left an error of small or great importance on almost every page, to stress the unreliability of both the narrator and the fallibility of memory. I doubtless took it all at face value at the time, so it's a good thing that my memory of it is almost nothing.
It's funny--I was just reading the latest New Yorker piece on Eliot, and he apparently did much the same thing in The Wasteland.
Hi Adrian, It's not easy to find an email address for you, so this is how I'm leaving you a message. I'm reading the new Crime Factory anthology and your story "The Ladder" really impressed me. It works on a bunch of levels and what it says about the protected, tenured life in universities is barbed. Thanks.
I have a story in the antho too. It's called "2,984,000 Pounds of Pressure." I'm really thrilled to be in the same collection of short stories as you.
Best regards,
Anonymous-9
anonwrite9@gmail.com
www.anonymous-9.com
Anon
I'd love to read your story but they never sent me a copy of the anthology which I am not impressed by. If you're not going to pay your contributors at least you should send them a copy or copies of the anthology. Right?
I haven't read Ross's book (yet), but I've sat read more than a few discussions about the difference between operas and musicals, and it's at most a very fuzzy line.
The best answer I've seen is that American musicals have song & dance routines, while operas don't have much dancing, and almost never by the leads. But European musicals mucked that up, and now even American musicals don't always have dancing.
But every other answer is even less satisfying.
Gavin
I have a sneaking suspicion that the real distinction is that if it's popular then it must be a musical, but if it's unpopular and subsidised in some way then it's probably an opera.
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