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Letter to the editor

Music critic's survey celebrates glorious 'Noise'

Alex Ross ventures far beyond the music in this well-composed exposition of 100 years of classical sounds.

By John Fleming, Times Performing Arts Critic
Published November 11, 2007

At the beginning of the 20th century, the classical music world was enthralled by the premiere of Salome, Richard Strauss' unholy opera from the Bible by way of Oscar Wilde that marked the end of the golden age of German romanticism. Near the close of the century, there was another path-breaking opera, Nixon in China, John Adams' account of President Richard Nixon's historic visit to China, which allowed the American baby boomer "to clean out all the cobwebs of the European past."

Thus does Alex Ross frame his foray into the wild and woolly world of contemporary music, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. In between the Strauss and Adams operas, he explores works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Copland, Shostakovich, Messiaen, Britten and many more composers.

But who else has been listening? Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker, addresses head-on the complexity and marginalization of much of 20th century music - "this obscure pandemonium on the outskirts of culture."

With its title playing off Shakespeare Hamlet's last words were "The rest is silence", Ross' book is cultural history of the highest order, reminiscent in its prodigious range and fluency of Edmund Wilson's intellectual page turners on the literature and thought of the Civil War (Patriotic Gore) and Marxism (To the Finland Station). Tellingly, a hero - or antihero - of Ross' narrative is the fictional composer Adrian Leverkuhn, the Schoenbergian figure of Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus.

In Ross' hands, pondering the predicament of composers in the 20th century provides brilliant insight into issues such as totalitarianism (Strauss and Shostakovich), spirituality (Messiaen) and homosexuality (Britten). Historical forces - namely, the rise of Nazism - led to the surreal circumstance in the 1940s that exiles Schoenberg and Stravinsky ("the twin giants of modernism") both ended up living off Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Ross has a gift for combining musical expertise with vivid imagery, such as his evocation of "two-note patterns dripping like blood on marble" in Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, or the atonal works of Carl Ruggles "having the hardness and coarseness of granitic rock." He can be very funny: "With his egg-shaped head, bulging eyes and luxurious mouth, Stravinsky had a slightly insectoid appearance."

No critic bridges the chasm between classical music and pop culture more deftly than Ross, who seems to have listened to everything. Scattered throughout his tome are offbeat epiphanies such as Hollywood composer Scott Bradley using Schoenberg's 12-tone method in scores for Tom and Jerry cartoons; the debt that John Coltrane's A Love Supreme owes to the Sibelius Fifth Symphony; the connection between minimalist pioneer Steve Reich and the British art rock band Roxy Music; and rap group Public Enemy's Welcome to the Terrordome as "the Rite of Spring of black America."

Sometimes Ross tries to do too much, with exhaustive (and exhausting) summaries of works like the Berg operas Wozzeck and Lulu. He drops the name of virtually every composer to make any sort of splash, from Mark Adamo to Bernd Alois Zimmermann (whose Requiem for a Young Poet sounds like an amazing epic in Ross' description). The saving grace of such comprehensiveness is the catalog of works that constitutes a user's guide to music unfamiliar to most ears. Want to sample Ligeti? Try Atmospheres. Don't know where to start with Morton Feldman? Rothko Chapel may be his masterpiece.

The Rest Is Noise includes a list of 30 recommended recordings, and Ross' excellent Web site has more. His site, www.therestisnoise.com, is full of sound bites and commentaries; surfing through them is like taking a great course on modern music.

As I read the chapter on Sibelius, "Apparition from the Woods," I listened to a CD of Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra playing the Finnish composer's masterful Fifth Symphony. It was a sublime experience. The best thing about Ross' writing is that it makes you want to hear the music.

John Fleming can be reached at (727) 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com.

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
By Alex Ross
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 624 pages, $30

[Last modified November 7, 2007, 17:40:08]