Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Strauss and the G.I.s

Cleaning my office the other day, I rediscovered this photo, which was given to me by the oboist John de Lancie. It is of Richard Strauss in the summer of 1945, at his home in Garmisch. De Lancie, who asked Strauss to compose the work that became the Oboe Concerto, sent me an extremely generous letter after I wrote about Strauss in 1999. He commented that he had a hard time recognizing the alternately cold and vulgar figure who was depicted in many books, articles, and portraits; this snapshot, he said, caught the man he knew. De Lancie died in 2002. Opening that letter, and seeing that craggy smile, was one of the loveliest moments of my writing life; it was almost as if I'd had a message from Strauss himself.
The Rest Is Noise, my history of twentieth-century music, begins and ends with tales of Strauss — first, a scene of him presiding triumphantly over the Austrian premiere of his opera Salome in 1906; then, glimpses of him in his last weeks and days, as he muses wryly over his long, strange life. ("I have outlived even myself," he said.) I'm not sure why Strauss fascinates me so. When I wrote in my New Yorker essay that he was the "composer of the century," I did not intend to suggest that he was the greatest composer of the century; there are pieces of his — the ballet Schlagobers, the opera Friedenstag — that seem to gainsay greatness by their very existence. Actually, there is no "greatest composer of the century"; it's a condescending formulation that diminishes a fantastically rich period to a quaint village that one man could be the mayor of. Who would try to pick out the greatest composer of the eighteenth century, or the nineteenth? Yet I do feel there is something profoundly representative about Strauss' work, in all its strengths and flaws. Thomas Mann began his long essay on Wagner with the words: "Sorrowing and grand, like the nineteenth century of which he was the perfect expression, the spirit of Richard Wagner stands before my eyes." That's how Strauss appears to me, except that "sorrowing" and "grand" aren't the right words.

For several years, I have been gathering stories from American soldiers who met Strauss in Garmisch after the end of the war. For some reason I find these tales incredibly moving. If you or anyone you know met the composer in the period from 1945 to 1949, please write to Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 4 Times Square, NY NY 10036, or to alexrossny at gmail dot com. I would love to hear your story. The 10th Armored Division and the 103rd Infantry Division were in the area at the time. Also, I would like to know more about Maj. John Kramers, a military-government officer hailing from Philadelphia, who seems to have been the first American to talk to Strauss on April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler's suicide.

The awesome power of the Internet

My experiment in direct marketing must be counted a triumphant success. Evidence exists that no fewer than three people bought Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's Handel record at my urging. What's more, Amazon.com's servers have obviously gone haywire as a result of the untold dozens of readers who followed my link there yesterday morning. How else to explain the album actually falling in Amazon's sales rankings? They must be begging me to stop the insanity. Therefore, I am calling an end to my "strike" and will go back to nattering on about Richard Strauss.

Critic on strike

I'm not writing a new post until all 100,000 people who've visited this site since May — I know, 40,000 of the hits are me refreshing the page after making pointless revisions — have bought Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's Handel record. Amazon is offering it together with her similarly soul-transfiguring Bach record for $28.98. Here are some other things you can buy for $28.98: the Swingline 390 Heavy-Duty Stapler, Eric Clapton's There's One in Every Crowd, the Linksys Network Adapter, two pounds of Whey Protein Bodybuilding Chocolate, and a DVD of The Nutty Professor II. The fate of culture is in your hands.

100,000 hits to date

Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Internet.

Death and transfiguration (revised)

Tony Tommasini wrote in the Sunday New York Times: “For too long, the troubles among the major record companies and leading performing arts institutions have been taken as proof that the entire classical music field is struggling to engage an uninterested general public.” Yes. The former leading labels may be struggling to justify themelves to the corporate (non)entities that own them, but Nonesuch, ECM, Hyperion, and Harmonia Mundi have defined the category "major" out of existence, and there seems to be no end of new glories. I dithered over a dozen rave-worthy releases before picking René Jacobs’ Figaro, the Anna Netrebko recital, and Till Fellner’s Well-Tempered Clavier for my CD column last week. Here are six other recent discs that are evidence of something other than an industry in decline:

Handel Arias, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (Avie). I'm running out of superlatives for La Lieberson. What can you say about her singing of "Ombra mai fù"? It is supreme. It is beyond. It is beyond the beyond. It leaves the beyond in the dust. It obliterates. It is absolutely the end. It is the music that will be playing ten thousand miles above the powers that be as they shuffle down to the special hell reserved for those who judge and will be judged. Sorry. Got carried away. It's really good.

Vivaldi, Concertos for the Emperor, Andrew Manze and the English Concert (Harmonia Mundi). Manze’s soul-shivering arpeggios in the finale of the C-minor concerto give you a very good idea of how the composer himself might have sounded at a famous concert of 1715: "Towards the end, Vivaldi played a solo accompaniment — splendid — to which he appended a cadenza which really frightened me, for such playing has never been nor can be."

Bartók, Violin Sonatas, Christian Tetzlaff and Leif Ove Andsnes (Virgin Classics). More white-hot fiddling: the raw rural songs that Bartók heard in Eastern Europe and North Africa dance through the modernist melee.

Monteverdi, Orfeo (Virgin Classics). A cast of young stars — Ian Bostridge, Natalie Dessay, Alice Coote, Christopher Maltman, Lorenzo Regazzo, Véronique Gens, Patrizia Ciofi, Paul Agnew — sing Monteverdi’s genre-solidfying opera better than it has ever been sung in the past. Emmanuelle Haïm draws beauty and mystery from Le Concert d’Astrée and the European Voices.

Bach, Beethoven, and Webern, Piotr Anderszewski (Virgin Classics). A staggeringly gifted young pianist with a Richter-like ability to sustain tension through stretches of perilously slow playing.

Leon Fleisher Two Hands (Vanguard). When I wrote about Fleisher's mesmerizing master classes last spring, I never actually got to hear him play the piano. The dean of American pianists has regained the use of his right hand, and his account of Schubert's B-flat sonata dwells in no one's shadow, not even the master Schnabel's. The encores come first: "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" had me in tears after thirty seconds.

And the hits keep coming — surreally beautiful Ysaÿe solo violin sonatas played by Thomas Zehetmair (ECM); Fretwork's ravishing, revelatory compilation of the sixteenth-century songs of Ludwig Senfl (Harmonia Mundi; with tenor Charles Daniel); the fine young violinist Daniel Hope playing Ravel, Ravi Shankar, Bartók, and Schnittke with an east-west ensemble (Warner Classics); Rachel Barton Pine’s masterly Baroque recital (Cedille). I don't know if it's an age, but it's golden.

Hans Pfitzner Blues Explosion

I've received a few suggestions from elsewhere in the blögôsphère for rock-band-ish classical ensemble names. Robert Gable proposes Joan Tower of Power and the Amy Beach Boys, while Madrigalia (I blush) offers Nissan Doorman, The Vivaldi Underground, Wreckwiem, and Stradella My Ass, Baby. Although the Fredösphere himself has not spoken, he has ventilated his permalinks and prepared an extraordinarily gracious nonacceptance speech for the MacArthur "genius" awards. You can find his original crazy-band-name post here and my response down there.

Dept. of Oops

I just noticed that an error crept into the final copy of last week's column, and I'm surprised there hasn't been a spate of irate letters about it. The Well-Tempered Clavier is not a set of "piano preludes and fugues." Bach was unacquainted with Signor Cristofori's pianoforte invention at the time he wrote Book I. Is this, Sir, what passes now for criticism in the once august pages of the New Yorker? Cancel my subscription forthwith and posthaste. (An editor writes: the word "piano" was meant to go in front of "reading," not "preludes and fugues.") The other mistake in the piece is that it did not mention Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's Handel disc, which I just bought at Virgin Megastore, of all places, and cannot stop listening to.

Agenda 9/28-10/3

My beat this week:

9/28: Music of Phil Kline and Scott Johnson at Merkin Hall. Includes Kline's Zippo Songs and Rumsfeld Songs.
9/29: Michael Webster's workshop opera Hell, with libretto by poet Eileen Myles, at St. Marks Church.
9/30: Augusta Read Thomas' new work Gathering Paradise at the New York Philharmonic. Emily Dickinson settings.
10/2: Mr. Sasha Frere-Jones pimps a panel on pop and politics.
10/2: Frederick Renz leads a 60-piece original-instrument orchestra in Handel's Royal Fireworks and Water Music.
10/3: Pomerium sings sacred music of Gombert and Ockeghem at Corpus Christi Church.

Feline perspectives: Bartók's "atonal" period

Penelope registers the seismographic dissonance of Bartók’s First Piano Concerto, yet the alienated familiarity of the folkloristic material keeps her attention engaged. Plus, the top of the stereo is nice and warm.

The Fredösphere

is my new favorite blog. Fred Himebaugh is an Ann Arbor-based choral conductor and composer whose music, enticingly excerpted on his site, has a hand-carved hymnal beauty. He is also, ja, funny. I posted his variations on the "dancing about architecture" motif below. I've now found his suggested names for sensitive-quirky rock bands of the Death Cab for Cutie type. Favorites are “Anthropomorphine,” “Charismatic Megafauna,” “Orthogonal To Blackness,” “White Like Ike.” (He doesn’t have permalinks, so you have to scroll down to Sept. 20.) As Fred mentions, classical ensembles like Ethel, Eighth Blackbird, and Alarm Will Sound are getting in on this “Huh?” act. Here is my list of possible names for the next generation of would-be hipper-than-thou classical groups:

Majestic Morendo
The Fussies
Gesamtkunstwerkit
Karl Ditters von Diddydorf
Collapsing Talmud Edition
Samuel Barber of Seville
Hans Pfitzner Blues Explosion
B8thoven Boyz
Boulezbians
The Revolution Will Not Be Chromaticized

Kind of lame, I know. Help me out, blögôsphère (as classical bloggers might be called).

The Toronto gambit

The Times Magazine has a piece today on the lightning-fast world of political blogging. That’s nothing next to the speedfreak intensity of the classical blogosphere (blögôsphère), where, if you don’t respond within seconds to a hot Glenn Petry press release or ArtsJournal posting, you’re left gasping in the dust. That’s what happened to me when Sandow jumped all over the news that the Toronto Symphony has decided to ghetto-ize new-music programming in an annual festival format. You snooze, you lose. Damn you, Sandow! (Irony now ending.) I half-agree with the Sandow take on this — not to condemn the action but to praise it (kind of). As long as orchestras are doing something for composers, I’m happy, and maybe Toronto has seen the future. Classical music has at least two potential audiences — the extant subscriber public, which wants nineteenth-century concertos and symphonies, and a younger crowd, who’d theoretically like a mix of old and new. The institution of the subscription-series premiere long ago turned into a ghastly ritual, generating reams of five- and twenty-minute pieces that served no vital function. Only a few composers are capable of making subscribers happy; John Adams can write only so much. And even he gets dyspeptic reactions from the Philharmorons. If the practice of squirreling premieres in the regular season could be replaced with vigorously marketed new-music festivals, catering to a different audience altogether, cool. But I’m skeptical that orchestras have the will or savvy to pull it off. The unions would probably find a way to quash the concept before it got off the drawing board. Hasn’t this already been tried, q. v. Boulez’s pseudo-psychedelic Rug Concerts? Let’s see what happens in Toronto.

About the about

AC Douglas responds to my post below: "Alone among the arts, music addresses and speaks directly to the center of feeling, bypassing altogether, and with no need of the interposition of, the intellectual faculty." It's an elegant paraphrase of Schopenhauer, who wrote, "Because music does not, like all the other arts, exhibit the Ideas or grades of the will's objectification, but directly the will itself, we can also explain that it acts directly on the will, i. e., the feelings, passions, and emotions of the hearer, so that it quickly raises these or even alters them." I agree with ACD and AS that music can have a tremendous blindsiding effect, but I don't see why other art forms aren't capable of doing the same. Turner's paintings affect me in ways that I could never hope to put into words. Then again, I'm not an art critic, so it's easy for me to gesture vaguely toward the unspeakable sublimity of Turner and leave it at that. (Checking my links, I find that Scott Spiegelberg has written a post almost identical to this one, and more thoroughly argued.)

Felix Salmon has a thoughtful response to my post about City Opera's Daphne last week. He's wrong to suggest that I was trying to be nice at all costs; I simply wanted to avoid repeating myself. But he generally has a good point, which is that classical music critics might be so afraid of injuring their allegedly endangered art that they become, in Spiro Agnew's deathless phrase, pusillanimous pussyfooters. This is a topic for the music critics' symposium next month; Justin Davidson and I have been e-mailing about it. More than once I've heard a colleague say at intermission, "God, this is awful," and then read a review with sentences like, "While the singers were not always in perfect form, the performance was a worthy effort all round." Perhaps I've done it myself. As Justin wrote to me the other day, the important thing is to be both passionate and honest — at once an evangelist for the art and a skeptical recorder of its follies. The prime disease of CM criticism is being polite.

Here is a classic post by Greg Sandow on and around the issues Felix raises. As a rule, I don't like talking about criticism and other critics — it's like yodeling about yodeling. "Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself...."

Breakdancing about bluegrass

The difficulty or impossibility of writing about music is a topic of debate at such estimable sites as Musical Perceptions, Sounds and Fury, and Reflections in D minor. I have to admit I never got that old "dancing about architecture" joke, which has been attributed variously to Schopenhauer, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Snuffleupagus. Why is music more difficult to write about than any other art form? Why isn't writing about architecture like sculpting about poetry? Or, to quote some imaginative variations introduced by The Fredösphere, like "yodeling about film noir," "woodworking about virtual reality," "chanting about matchstick cathedrals," "weaving about anime," or "boogying about wabi-sabi"? Here is my choice aphorism: writing about music is like writing.

Boulez as Fonzie

Mr. Sun kindly provides a link to my "top 10" apparatus mentioned below. He also comes up with a briliant aperçu: "If classical music isn't dead, it's at least jumped the shark." For those who don't know, "jumping the shark" is web-generated lingo for long-running TV shows that enter their decadent stages by introducing ridiculous plot devices — for example, Fonzie waterskiing over a shark on Happy Days or the "it was all a dream" season on Dallas. (The genius of Alias is that it has jumping the shark as its premise.) These credibility-destroying moments are usually the work of self-absorbed, burned-out teams of writers. Thanks to Mr. Sun, I think I finally understand what happened in twentieth-century music: we jumped the shark. But, hey, we're still on the air.

Top 10 in depth: Eroica

A while back I promised to write some entries explaining my rough-and-ready top 10 list for classical music. At the top of the list is Leonard Bernstein's recording of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, his Third. I picked this recording not because it's the greatest Eroica ever — if pressed, I'd name Klemperer's EMI version instead — but because Bernstein's radio lecture, included with the Sony CD, is maybe the most effective introduction to the intellectual and emotional power of classical music that I know of. Be forewarned: Lenny's Brahmin ahccent makes John Kerry sound like Boss Hogg.

I rambled on about the Eroica in my long essay "Listen To This." (There's the fatal C# in the corner of the picture.) Here, briefly, I'll say that the Eroica is the ne-plus-ultra demonstration of how to develop a theme. "In the beginning was the Note,” Bernstein intoned in another lecture. That's what you hear at the outset: the Note, the Word, E-flats reverberating as total chords. But then what? The Note was what Beethoven perceived in the far reaches of his imagination or felt in the depths of his soul; after the flash of the eternal begins the struggle. It's really not much of a theme, once it gets started. Beethoven had good ideas, but Mozart and Schubert usually had better ones. The genius was in the working-out, the struggle, the creation of a form. Often, the more sundry the ideas, the more astounding the form. The Eroica marks the point at which Beethoven stops trying to conceal his difficulties behind a mask of Mozartean mastery; instead, he brings the struggle directly to the surface of the composition. The music seems sometimes not to know where it is going because Beethoven has no idea where it is going. This is, above all, honest music. Genius sweats and thrashes in real time. I get caught up the human drama time and again: Oh God, I think, this time he's not going to make it. But he does.

Reading Judit Frigyesi's book Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest, I came across some remarkable sentences by Georg Lukács: "The essence of art is form: it is to defeat oppositions, to conquer opposing forces, to create coherence from every centrifugal force, from all things that have been deeply and eternally alien to one another outside this form. The creation of form is the last judgment over things, a last judgment that redeems all that could be redeemed, that enforces salvation on all things with divine force."

In short, Beethoven kicks it.

Noted

"My efforts even in my young days were to rend the listeners' hearts with chords. It's a subtle matter and not achieved by mere discordance. Music is not made agonizing by crude events; it is the contrast between the sweet and the hard that is heart-rending."

— Percy Grainger, as quoted in the notes to John Eliot Gardiner's glorious 1996 Grainger CD (see esp. "Shallow Brown").

Diaristic

Bittersweet jogging playlist for the last hot day of the year: Rufus Wainwright's "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," Prince's "A Million Days," Percy Grainger's "Shallow Brown," Melonie Cannon's "Tennessee Roads," Scissor Sisters' "Mary," Kanye's "Jesus Walks," Led Zeppelin's "Since I've Been Loving You," The Walkmen's "The Rat," György Kurtág's Stele. Line that sticks in the head: The Walkmen's "Now I go out alone, if I go out at all" (the influence of Dr. Piazza is obvious).

192 Books is an excellent small bookstore on 10th Ave that deserves the support of local Manhattanites. Orhan Pamuk is reading there tonight at 7PM.

Confession: I don't feel like writing about Stravinsky.

At the Grave of Schnittke

Susan Tusing, professor of music at Andrews College in Georgia, sent me this photograph of the grave of Alfred Schnittke, which she took on a recent visit to Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow. She thought it might serve to illustrate the guiding concept of my book and site, "The Rest Is Noise," which indeed it does. The deceased composer asks for a very loud (fff) silence (rest), prolonged by an extra beat or two (the fermata overhead).

Some years ago I got into the morbid habit of snapping pictures of composers' graves, the more obscure the better. Here are the final resting places of Fibich, Enescu, and Xavier Scharwenka. And here are my 1992 and 1998 essays on the late Dr. Schnittke, whom I had the honor of meeting a few years before his death, oddly enough at the Watergate Hotel.

Ask Mr. Noise

Christopher Porter recently asked on his blog whether the music of Luigi Nono had any effect on Jerry Goldsmith's score for Planet of the Apes. Embarrassingly, I've never seen the grand original, though I did see the sucky Marky Mark remake. I've been listening to the Planet of the Apes soundtrack, and I'm not hearing anything that positively screams "NONO!" to me, like Lulu on the ropes. Instead, Goldsmith, like Michael Giacchino in the Alias music I talked about yesterday, draws selectively on devices from the 1950s / 1950s generation of avant-garde European tone-setters. The rapid, jerky, non-tonal movement among a pointillistic scattering of notes recalls Webern and his myriad 1950s clones. Tones that slither upward or downward in glissando motion are (to reuse yesterday's coinage) Xenakitastic, also Ligetidelic. The faintly upsetting mix of instrumental and electronic sounds evokes the tunecrib* of Milton Babbitt's electronic pieces. Pounding rhythmic themes for strings doubled by piano are très, très Bartok. Most original to my ear is the mixing of electric guitar with all the above; this is quite unusual for a composer writing in 1968, anticipating Bernstein's Mass (1971). All told, it's fabulously inventive film music, and I'm glad Mr. Porter led me to it. But as for Nono, I no know.

*Technical term meaning Klangwelt, or sound-world.

Sark!

Mwanji Ezana, of the be-jazz blog, posts about the seductively implausible TV series Alias, which somehow gives me license to do the same. Jonathan and I recently finished a marathon Alias-watching session that took us through Season 3. We are now thoroughly conversant with The Passenger, The Restoration, The Hour-Glass, and other apocalyptic gadgets of Rambaldi. (This season was a sort of seamless blend of the Revelation of St. John and the Sharper Image catalogue.) I do have a topical point to make: Michael Giacchino writes excellent music for the show, and is particularly adept at 50’s / 60’s avant-garde styles. One or two episodes were essentially Xenakitastic from beginning to end. And I love the musical joke that plays out each week over the closing credits: the main Alias theme is a take-off on “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Which is what the series is about.

Picture courtesy of the Vartan Hos.