Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Music and torture

Futility Music. Post at the New Yorker's Goings On blog.

Statistic of the week

Pierre Ruhe celebrates the inaugural season of Fringe, Atlanta's alternative chamber-music series. Fringe's organizers tell me that 62 percent of the audience has been under the age of forty.

Interrogations

It's always hazardous to open mail when there's work to do. Two items — the second volume of Prokofiev's diaries, from Cornell University Press, and a two-CD set of the music of Johanna Magdalena Beyer, from New World Records — have thrown me off course over the past couple of days. The Prokofiev diaries, first of all, are totally riveting. Although the composer could be drearily self-centered — what genius isn't? — he sharply observed the world around him and his prose has considerable flair. This volume cover the years 1915 to 1923, when Prokofiev witnessed the Russian Revolution, tried his fortunes in America, and wound up in the Russian émigré community in Paris. Here are two quick teasers. First, from the end of 1917:

The month's end passed in transcribing Seven, They Are Seven and contemplation of an engrossing new idea: Lina Collini mentioned in passing one day that she was planning to leave Russia for America — and it suddenly struck me that there was no need for me to stay in Russia either. In the flow of idle chatter this tiny spark was seemingly extinguished almost at once, but in fact what appeared at the time to be no more than a passing remark proved to be explosive material that in an instant flared up into a conflagration. To go to America! Of course! Here was wretchedness; there life brimming over. Here, slaughter and barbaric rhetoric; there, cultivated life. Here, shabby concerts in Kislovodsk; there, New York, Chicago! No time for hesitation. In the spring I will go. If only America does not turn against a Russia that has now abandoned the war! Such was the flag under which I greeted the New Year. Surely it will not disappoint my hopes?

Some months later, in San Francisco, Prokofiev finds himself under interrogation from American immigration authorities:

"What is this?"
"Music."
"Did you write it yourself?"
"I did, on board ship."
"Can you play it?"
"I can."
"Play it, then."

On the piano in the ship's saloon, I played the main theme of the Violin Sonata on its own, without accompaniment. It was not appreciated.

"Can you play Chopin?"
"What would you like me to play?"
"The Funeral March."

I played four bars. The official evidently enjoyed it.

"Very good," he said, with feeling.
"Did you know for whose death it was composed?"
"No."
"His dog's."

Prokofiev is detained for a couple of days, and another conversation ensues:

"Have you ever been in prison?"
"Yours."

I could go on —  it's an amazing book and a precious historical resource.

Johanna Beyer is an early twentieth-century American modernist who is slowly emerging from the shadows. I first encountered her music on a fine New Albion CD by the pianist Sarah Cahill. At the time, it didn't make a strong impression — the Nine Preludes by Ruth Crawford Seeger were for me the disc's main draw — but I'm beginning to see why Beyer has cast a spell over various latter-day composers, musicians, and scholars, among them Cahill, Charles Amirkhanian, Larry Polansky, John Kennedy, and Amy Beal. Beyer was born in Leipzig, in 1888, and came to America in the twenties. She took up composing at a relatively late date, and was heavily influenced by "dissonant counterpoint" and other ultra-modern techniques espoused by Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, and Ruth Crawford. The last-named was plainly her primary model. The two string quartets on the New World set — evocatively played by members of the Astra Chamber Music Society, of Melbourne — are closely allied to the Seeger Quartet, a masterpiece of twentieth-century chamber music. But Beyer has her own voice. Glissandos, cluster chords, obsessive ostinatos, and complex tempo structures are woven together with startling bursts of lyricism and flashes of wit. Polansky properly describes the finale of the First Quartet (1933-34) as "nothing short of astonishing," a prophecy of minimalist and post-minimalist music of the seventies and eighties. I imagine Kyle Gann having a field day with it.

The historian in me is especially fascinated by two works for chorus entitled The Federal Music Project and The Composers Forum Laboratory. In researching my book I spent some days going through the records of the Federal Music Project at the National Archives, studying that brief but remarkable period when the federal government funded orchestras, opera houses, music-education projects, and, yes, contemporary-music concerts. I found Beyer's name in the files of the Composers' Forum-Laboratory, which gave composers a platform to present their work and then obliged them to answer questions from the audience. The latter part of the process could prove exasperating, as in Beyer's Q&A of May 20, 1936:

Q: Really, Miss Beyer, is there any beauty in your pathological sounds and noises? Or does it appeal to some other sense?

A: Apparently it is nothing but noise.

The Laboratories drew forth many complaints about supposed excesses of dissonance and rhythmic complexity, although sometimes a tonally oriented composer got a grilling from the modernist faction, as in this session with Henry Holden Huss:

Q: Why does Mr. Huss prefer to retain the "major triad formula" as late as 1935?

A: You take two tones and add them to a third and you have a star, and you must look to the stars and heaven.

With the permission of New World, I'm supplying audio of the beginning of Federal Music Project, which was written in 1936, in the heady early days of the federal arts projects. Here's the text: "I know of an active bee-hive, / it buzzes and bubbles all day, / is full of creative ideas, / a nucleus of a future so gay!" You'll need headphones or good speakers to catch the low buzzing at the outset.

There's something intriguingly mournful about the music, as if Beyer already sensed that this "future, oh, so bright" — to quote the last lines of her text — would never come to fruition. And doesn't the repetition of "I know, I know" sound eerily like the flute and violin lines in the opening seascape of Peter Grimes, written some years later? Beyer died in total obscurity in 1944, her last years made horribly difficult by ALS, and it's a wonderful thing that she's seeing the light of day again.

Symphonic kitty

A Mahler-loving cat showed up at a recent performance by the Israel Philharmonic. Nancy Pelosi, who was in the audience, proposed that the cat be named Zubin. Incidentally, a source at the Met tells me that Pelosi is a fan of Philip Glass and attended a performance of Satyagraha this spring. One might detect a trace of her enthusiasm in a speech she gave on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

For Wilfrid Mellers

Wilfrid Mellers, a wise, passionate, deeply generous writer on music, has passed away at the age of ninety-four. I treasure his books on Percy Grainger and Poulenc, his twentieth-century survey Caliban Reborn, his not entirely convincing but always captivating studies of Dylan and the Beatles, and, above all, his 1965 work on American classical and jazz composers, Music in a New Found Land. It's a scandal that the last-named has long been out of print. I've quoted before and I'll quote again Mellers's visionary salute to Morton Feldman:

The tones [in Durations 1-5] are always isolated, immensely slow, and delicately soft, and when instruments play together, because the durations overlap, the simultaneous sounds are often unisonal or concordant. An infinitely slow drone on muted tuba, a major third on muted string harmonics, sound as though the players are creating the tones out of the eternal silence, and we are being born afresh in learning to listen to them. Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little that is left is, like all of Feldman's work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from fear. The music's passive, rarefied tenderness seems to have the therapeutic property of making us saner, rather than more mad.  Since the question of sanity or madness can hardly be decided, however, without some human criterion as reference, it may be that the cycle of "consciousness" has, willy-nilly, started again.

In Mellers's honor, a bit of Grainger's "Shallow Brown," with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Country Gardiner Orchestra (Philips/ArkivMusic):

Sounds of the century

Go here for audio samples to accompany The Rest Is Noise, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Book FAQ

What is the intended audience for this book?

While I worked on The Rest Is Noise, I kept two different audiences in mind. I certainly hoped that readers well versed in classical music would find the book rewarding. But, even more important, I longed to introduce this rich, complex world of sound to those who have little or no acquaintance with it. No great musical knowledge is required, although I do periodically use a few simple technical terms (see glossary).

How did you become interested in the subject?

I grew up listening exclusively to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical music, from Bach to Brahms. I even tried to write my own pieces in quasi-Viennese style. Only when I got to college did I realize that the world of music was far bigger than I knew. I fell under the spell of Richard Strauss's Salome, the early atonal works of Schoenberg, and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. They flung open all kinds of doors in my mind. A little later, I exulted in the wild sounds of the post-World War II avant-garde: Ligeti, Xenakis, Stockhausen. They eventually led me to the free jazz of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman and to the avant-rock of the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth. In a sense, the book replicates that journey of discovery. But I’m also fascinated by music's role in the wider culture and in twentieth-century history. The main story of The Rest Is Noise is the volatile, ever-changing relationship between composers and the society around them. If I could boil the book down to two words, it would be: Composers matter.

What does the title mean?

It's a reference to Hamlet's last words, "The rest is silence." I had in mind the widespread perception that classical composition devolved into noise as the twentieth century went on. What may sound like noise on first hearing may reveal hidden beauty if you give it a second chance.

Is the book named after the blog?

No, the blog is named after the book. I came up with the title The Rest Is Noise in 1999. I started the blog in 2004.

How long did it take to write the book?

I researched the book in 2000 and 2001 and began writing toward the end of 2001. A first draft was done by the end of 2004, but it turned out to be vastly overlong — nearly twice as long as the published version. So I spent two more years cutting it down to size. I finally completed the book in January 2007, while staying at the Omni Hotel in Los Angeles, overlooking Walt Disney Concert Hall.

What about [overlooked composer X]?

I was determined to produce a readable narrative that wouldn't overwhelm the uninitiated reader with too many names. I had no wish to produce a sequential encyclopedia. So I had to make some agonizing decisions about whom to include and whom to omit. Many composers I personally revere — Carl Nielsen, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Silvestre Revueltas, among others — receive short shrift. Essentially, I found that certain composers' stories worked better than others in advancing the principal theme, which is music's relationship with surrounding historical events. I hope that readers will go on to explore the many significant figures whom I mention only in passing or leave out altogether.

Why waste so much time on ugly atonal music at the expense of beautiful, accessible tonal scores? Why lavish attention on spurious tonal music at the expense of powerful, uncompromising modernism?

I've heard both questions. This book gives equal time to the so-called "progressive" and "conservative" camps in twentieth-century music and seeks out common ground between them — noticing, for example, that Morton Feldman loved the seemingly retrograde Jean Sibelius, or that American minimalism grew out of La Monte Young's admiration for the super-refined twelve-tone music of Anton Webern.

Why not give more attention to popular music?

I listen to pop music all the time, and I’ve written several long articles on favorite artists such as Bob Dylan, Radiohead, and Björk. In the earliest stages, I thought of trying to write the history of popular music alongside the history of classical composition. I quickly realized that such an undertaking would be foolhardy. Having grown up with classical music and discovered pop only later in life, I lacked the basic knowledge to do such a thing. Nor did it seem remotely possible to cover such a vast subject in a single volume. However, the exchange of ideas between classical and popular artists is another major leitmotif of my story, whether it's Duke Ellington listening to Debussy or Steve Reich taking in Coltrane or George Gershwin inhabiting both spheres at once.

Why isn't a recording included with the book?

I believe that the Internet provides a better way for people to hear musical illustrations. A CD would hold 80 minutes of music at most — a smattering of movements and short pieces. The Audio Guide I've set up on this site lets you hear hundreds of samples, adding up to dozens of hours of music. I've also supplied numerous links to websites where more info can be found: archives such as the Schoenberg Center in Vienna, dedicated sites for living composers, digitized manuscripts at various libraries. And, thanks to YouTube, I've been able to embed a number of videos of historical footage and live performances.

What's your background and musical training?

I was born in 1968 in Washington DC, the wayward son of two geologists. My grandfather was also a geologist, my great-grandfather a Greek Orthodox priest. I started playing piano at age ten and started composing at around the same time. I studied with the composer Russell Woollen, a pupil of Nadia Boulanger, and also with the composer-pianist Denning Barnes. In addition, I played the oboe in school orchestras. I gave up composing while I was at college, although I did take a class with Peter Lieberson. My main musical activity at college was at the campus radio station, where I presented several programs devoted to twentieth-century composers and began writing music criticism. My first regular gig as a critic was at the record-review magazine Fanfare; my first articles in a general-interest publication were for The New Republic. I moved to New York to become a fifth-string critic at the New York Times in 1992, and the following year I wrote my first piece for The New Yorker. The magazine hired me full time in 1996, and I've been happy ever after.

Are you working on your next book?

I've made plans for two new books, but I’m not quite ready to discuss them yet. Please stay tuned!

Upward glissando in Alabama

An e-mail from Bridge Records alerted me to the ostensibly surprising fact that when the Alabama Symphony played an all-contemporary program of Paul Lansky's Shapeshifters, Jonny Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver, and Poul Ruders's Light Overture last month, the concert was completely sold out. Michael Huebner reports for the Birmingham News. You might attribute the success principally to Greenwood's Radiohead celebrity, but I'd mention three other factors: 1) under the direction of Justin Brown, the Alabama Symphony is playing at a very high level; 2) they're putting a great deal of imagination into their programming; 3) tickets were $15. The orchestra has an excellent program this weekend: Pärt's Cantus, Sibelius's Violin Concerto (with Pekka Kuusisto, who right now is playing this piece more vibrantly than anyone on the circuit), and Walton's irresistible First Symphony. The 'heads are in Texas.

News from Minnesota: Osmo Vänskä, the genius music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, has been composing a bit in recent years, and William Schrickel, who leads the Metropolitan Symphony, another Twin Cities orchestra, commissioned Vänskä to write a piece titled The Bridge, which will be played this Sunday, May 18th. The piece is connected to the tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge last summer. It is also designed as a bridge to the Mahler Seventh Symphony, which will directly follow it on the program. Schrickel sees quite a bit of Vänskä in his day job: he is the Minnesota's assistant principal bassist.

Stravinsky Festival

Rite of Spring. The New Yorker, May 19, 2008.

More Igormania is on the way: the Michael Clark Company's Stravinsky Project comes to Lincoln Center in early June. Bob Shingleton caught the show in Norwich. The entire Columbia Records Stravinsky Edition can be obtained for $31 on Amazon, though it will be out of stock until June 14.