New Yorker critic Alex Ross surveys the many faces of 20th-century classical music
By Max Goldberg
lit@sfbg.com
“In the classical field it has long been fashionable to fence music off from society, to declare it a self-sufficient language,” Alex Ross writes in the preface to his new opus, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. “In the hyper-political twentieth century, that barrier crumbles time and again…. My subtitle is meant literally; this is the twentieth century heard through its music.” This is a bit of a misrepresentation, since The Rest Is Noise is first and foremost a review of composers’ lives, but Ross is indeed working on a grand canvas, stitching together innumerable discrete innovations in a seesawing account of modern classical music’s volatile politics of style.
Smart and cute? Hubba hubba …
Which is to say that while The Rest Is Noise may be telescopic as a political history — the 20th century here belongs to Central Europe, Russia, and America, with only minor walk-ons for whole continents — it’s entirely effective as a history of ideas. Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker, guides us with a generalist’s passion for connections and large-scale developments. He revels in the coincidences and overcrowding of the 20th century: in the way Richard Strauss’s life bridged Wagner to “American soldiers whistling ‘Some Enchanted Evening’” in Germany’s decimated cities; in the fact that two diametrically opposed titans of European composition (Schoenberg and Stravinsky) came to live miles apart in a Los Angeles teeming with émigrés (their neighbors included Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Alma Mahler, and Aldous Huxley).
Running through these overlapping microhistories are the categorizations that define 20th-century music as a realm of ideas: dissonance and tonality, zeitgeist and heartland, modernism and pastiche.