Posted on 05/04/2008 6:35:19 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise tells the story of what happened to Western classical music in the twentieth century. We all know that the invention of recorded sound around 1900 made possible an extraordinary dissemination of the riches of the classical repertoire – largely composed for the rich and powerful – to the mass of ordinary people. On the gramophone, the radio, television and, subliminally and hence more powerfully, through the movies, the classical sound in all its variants (even the supposedly rebarbative confections of the Second Viennese School) has insinuated itself into the culture at large. Never before have so many people listened to, or liked, so-called classical music. Yet this extraordinary triumph has culminated in a malaise, a feeling, widespread in the musical profession and elsewhere, that classical music is in crisis and that things have never been so bad. Classical music feels abandoned, left behind as history has moved on, sulking in its tent as the real cultural action happens somewhere else.
Ross’s book – which, in a two-pronged attack, puts the history back into music and music back into history – offers many answers to this paradox. In a book packed full of well-chosen and depicted vignettes and anecdotes, two stand out.
In 1904, Richard Strauss, the “anarch of art” as one American critic described him, visited the United States. He was received at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt. He was invited onto the floor of the Senate. How comforting this is for us besieged elitists, who grasp at such contemporary straws as the opera-loving Gordon Brown succeeding the Fender Stratocaster-wielding Blair. Once upon a time, serious music was given its due. Music does of course still have a political platform, a bully pulpit even; but it is pop musicians now who are wooed by political leaders, and classical musicians, with a very few exceptions (Daniel Barenboim springs to mind), who inhabit the margins. Whether political leverage, or cultural influence, were really good for classical music – tempting as it is to want to see the best of art appreciated and deferred to – is another question.
Thirty-eight years after Strauss’s American apotheosis (and some years after his shameful but complex accommodation with the Nazi regime in Germany, masterfully unpicked by Ross), in the midst of the Great Patriotic War, the score of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad”, was flown into that besieged city by Soviet military aircraft. Musicians were recalled from more straightforwardly martial duties on the front line to perform it. German commanders planning to disrupt the performance found themselves pre-empted by “Operation Squall”, a Soviet diversionary manoeuvre. The symphony was relayed over loudspeakers into no man’s land. As Ross puts it, “never in history had a musical composition entered the thick of battle in quite this way: the symphony became a tactical strike against German morale”.
If we were to ask why, at the opening of the twentieth century, and through the horrors of its first five decades, classical music retained such importance, the answer would have to be: Germany. Classical music, music which was more than entertainment, music which demanded reverent attention, and which even made metaphysical claims, was written into the very DNA of German culture. The German question, the political and diplomatic issue of how the German nation fitted into the world, dominated international affairs in the century between the 1848 revolutions and the Second World War. This was reflected in the philosophical and cultural preoccupations of the European elites, rooted as they were in German philosophical conceits and German political anxieties. Hegelianism, Marxism, nationalism, Wagnerism – love them or hate them, they all came from Germany and they framed the terms of debate in philosophy, political theory and music. If Schopenhauer put music at the centre of his philosophy as the most important art, one which uniquely traced the movements of the noumenal will, Wagner responded with music that fascinated and horrified artists in all disciplines. When it came to the great contest of the 1914–18 war, German propagandists like Thomas Mann characterized it as a conflict between the Kultur of Germans and the Zivilisation of their French-led opponents; between, in musical terms, the deep, metaphysical character of the German tradition, and the superficial joie de vivre of the French.
The price paid for classical music’s proximity to power was heavy, and the central chapters of Ross’s book lay bare the moral somersaults composers turned, the degradation into which they sank. The cultural theory which the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had inherited from the nineteenth gave artists a dangerous potency, the all too useful capacity to become, in Stalin’s words, “engineers of human souls”. Stalin’s amateur interest in classical music – he reputedly owned ninety-three opera recordings, writing critical remarks on his record sleeves – did nothing to protect composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich from the cultural policy of a regime which saw no role for anything that smacked of autonomous art. Shostakovich’s output veered between the cryptic privacy of his chamber music, the crassness of his patriotic cantatas and songs, and the still-contested “irony” of the major public works. Ross’s analysis of the possibility of irony in music is at one and the same time sceptical and appreciative. “To talk about musical irony”, he writes, “we first have to agree what the music appears to be saying, and then we have to agree on what the music is really saying. This is invariably difficult to do.” His concluding advice is that one should “stay alert to multiple levels of meaning”, making Shostakovich’s symphonies, the Fifth or even the supposedly propagandistic Seventh, “rich experience[s]”. The consequence of Ross’s superbly nuanced historical accounts of both Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s music is to send one back to the music with new ears.
In any aspirant totalitarian regime, cultural producers like musicians have to be overseen, goaded, persecuted and petted. Hitler’s Germany was different only in that a musical vision of politics was uniquely central to the nightmare that was played out in the Reich between 1933 and 1945. It wasn’t that music was too important not to be politicized, more that politics was music in another form; “Politics aspired to the condition of music, not vice versa”, as Ross puts it. The threatening rhetoric of Hitler’s coded language about the Jews from the Kroll Opera speech of 1939 on the eve of war, and the speeches from the period of the exterminations themselves, are drenched in Wagner, and Ross acutely picks out the references to Parsifal in the Führer’s tirades. Hitler’s very rise to power, his acquisition of the respectability which eased his accession, were eased by the musical culture he shared with the Wagner clan, which supported him from the early 1920s on, and whose fads and tastes – vegetarianism, animal rights, dabbling in Eastern mysticism – he enthusiastically adopted.
For Ross, the Nazi infatuation with music is the crux of his story. If nineteenth-century German politics and philosophy and musical endeavour made classical music unprecedentedly momentous, its implication in the near-annihilation of European civilization by the mid-century robbed it of moral authority, a collapse with which classical music still lives, sixty years on. As Ross points out, trivially but accurately, “when any self-respecting Hollywood archcriminal sets out to enslave mankind, he listens to a little classical music to get in the mood”.
It is Ross’s dissection of the career of Richard Strauss which most tellingly encapsulates classical music’s twentieth-century tragedy. The book opens with the Graz premiere of Salomé in 1906 (it had had its very first performance earlier the previous year in Dresden), conducted by the composer, and attended by Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg, Zemlinsky and Johann Strauss’s widow, but also very probably by a little-known Austrian teenager called Adolf Hitler. By the mid-1930s, Strauss is enthusiastically hailing the new regime: “Thank God, finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”. By 1942, he is, at once brave and pathetic, demanding entrance at Theresienstadt – “I am the composer Richard Strauss” – to try and rescue his Jewish daughter-in-law’s grandmother. By 1945, he is writing the profoundly disillusioned Metamorphosen and trying to trade on his American fame – “I am the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salomé” – to gain preferential treatment from the occupying American forces. As with Shostakovich, the moral and historical complexities lead one back to the music.
Ross’s broad historical argument, and his moral tale about music and power, occupy the central chapters of the book and inform much of the rest of it. His engagement with Stravinsky, Berg, Schoenberg, Sibelius and Britten is infectious; his accounts of New Deal arts policy, US Army sponsorship of Darmstadt Modernism, or 1960s interactions between art and pop music, are revelatory. As for the music itself, Alex Ross’s brave avoidance of musical notation and brilliant use of metaphorical and descriptive language, means that The Rest is Noise grapples with the actual stuff of music as few other books have done. And if you want to hear the sounds themselves, you can always go to his website at www.therestisnoise.com, and listen.
There was a double LP by Columbia that included a Bach transcription of a Vivaldi concerto as well as another concerto by a guy named Ernst, I think, who died when he was 19. Then there was a single LP that had other pieces such as Toccata and Fugue in D minor. He did an LP of Scott Joplin rags on the pedal harpsichord. I love the sound of that instrument. Finally, a harpsichord that wasn’t tinkly sounding. Trio sonatas 5 and 6 are especially good.
That is already happening, from what I can tell.
Have you seen the price of concert tickets lately?
Will do!
Thanks! I just sent the link to my son.
Good reason to listen to Bluegrass.
Seriously: has anyone seen the book?
Read it?
Sounds like interesting stuff for us non-musical sorts...
One of my joys is to have a computer at work that allows me to listen to BBC3, and as I sing in a church choir I am always interested in Aled Jones show called "The Choir." Their program for this week are songs in praise of Mary, Mother of Jesus.
Over the last few months I've heard recordings ranging from Viking songs, to "Sacred Music for Choir and Didgeridoo." Last week it was American College A Cappella Choirs singing everything from Ozzy Osbourne and Tenacious D song called "Tribute" as well as classical.
One of my favorite edisodes focused on Commercial music. Here was his "playlist, featuring choral music from Halo 3, Assassins creed, Final Fantasy VIII, and Clive Barkers Jericho, as well as several soundtracks.
My point is that we are all "Kings," we are all patrons. All music, even sacred music is produced to sell. When we connect with the emotion of the composer, we "buy" into it. Yes, propaganda can be musical. Classical music is no more or less a tool than any other method of communication.
In the twenty-first century, we are also all "rebels." Last night I watched "Immortal Beloved" again. This thread just reminded me of when Beethoven started out intending to praise Napoleon, and scratched out his name from Eroica. At the end of the film, as he was unable to hear the music of his Ninth symphony, the filmaker chose to represent the inspiration of Beethoven's joy as being a kid running away from his abusive dad into the freedom of a night swim under a thousand stars.
I can never hear that song without thinking of the fall of the Berlin Wall and that concert where Leonard Bernstein changed the words from "Joy (Freude)"" to "Freedom (Freiheit)" as the city was reunited. It expressed it perfectly - which is what classical music does, and why we still buy it.
BTW, my favorite violinist is Joe Venuti.
I like the term “Art Music” better, course they all claim to be artists...
My take on that is that I think the violin was the guitar of the 19th century, and the violin soloist was the guitar hero of his day. Got the idea from Paganini and some of the Anne Rice novels.
He’s one of the most accessible and popular 20th century composers. Who dislikes West Side Story?
‘The Rest is Noise’ you mean? It’s outstanding. I highly reccomend it.
Fascinating. Thanks!
Well, the destruction of the pop payola/playola system can’t help but be good for all kinds of music. Just the other day I got an itch to hear some klezmer music, so I popped it into Youtube and got all I wanted. The next day I wanted to hear some tangos, same thing. Today I’d like to hear some Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys instrumental swing. I bet I can find that too.
No, that's not right, that's not what he means. At any given time 90% of what is produced is crap, same now as it was in 1900, 1800, or 1700. "Classical" means withstanding the test of time, so what we have now is the very best, the very cream of what was produced in any given era. That said, it still seems like we are getting the short end of the stick in modern day. There are so many other choices for young people that not so many of them choose to try to push the envelope of art music.
I thought Call and Response was the quintessential African style, along with the driving beat.
Yes, and thanks; just remember that I don’t even play spoons so excessive technical detail would probably bury me.
Ian Bostridge. Too snobby for me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
