The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

In the late eighteenth century, 84 percent of the repertory of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra consisted of music by living composers. By 1855, the figure had declined to 38 percent, by 1870 to 24 percent.

Schoenberg’s reasoning was this: if the bourgeois audience was losing interest in new music, and if the emerging mass audience had no appetite for classical music new or old, the serious artist should stop flailing his arms in a bid for attention and instead withdraw into a principled solitude.

After a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, Mahler asked

the musicians to play a C-major triad. “Thank you,” he said, and walked out.

Nothing in the annals of musical scandal—from the first night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to the release of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.”—rivals the ruckus that greeted Schoenberg early in his career.

Schoenberg was the one who insisted that there was no going back. Indeed, he began to say tonality was dead—or, as Webern later put it, “We broke its neck.”

The joke went around that Webern had introduced the marking pensato: Don’t play the note, only think it.

Brno, and his parents welcomed the award because they could not afford to feed all their children.

So poor they only had one vowel.

When Charlie Parker came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the Rite into his solo on “Salt Peanuts.” Two years later, playing Birdland in New York, the bebop master spotted Stravinsky at one of the tables and immediately incorporated a motif from Firebird into “Koko,” causing the composer to spill his scotch in ecstasy.

William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, wrote that a condition of desperate mental flailing is often the prelude to spiritual renewal: “Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help!”

When, in 1930, he was asked to describe his public, he said, “I do not believe I have one.”

(The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp has investigated the phenomenon of the “musical chill,” a tremor that runs down the body and raises the hairs on the skin.

A passage in which a solo instrument steps in front of a softer background is especially prone to cause this effect; Panksepp compares it to “the separation call of young animals, the primal cry of despair to signal caretakers to exhibit social care and attention.”)

He once or twice caught his class off guard with the announcement that “there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.”

When music is heard, it is shot through with time, like a shining crystal; unheard music drops through empty time like a useless bullet.

Cage defined himself in terms that Boulez would have readily understood: “I am going

toward violence rather than tenderness, hell rather than heaven, ugly rather than beautiful, impure rather than pure—because by doing these things they become transformed, and we become transformed.”

The irony of the broken Cage-Boulez friendship was that certain of Cage’s chance pieces ended up sounding oddly similar to Boulez’s total-serialist pieces.

In later years he revealed a mystical streak, bordering on the hippie-dippy; it turned out that he had lived many past lives, and that he claimed to be extraterrestrial in origin.

In his Aspen speech Britten provocatively compared the regimentation of culture in totalitarian states to the self-imposed regimentation of the avant-garde in democratic countries.

“The title page could carry the dedication: ‘To the memory of the composer of this quartet’… It is a pseudo-tragic quartet, so much so that while I was composing it I shed the same amount of tears as I would have to pee after half-a-dozen beers. When I got home, I tried a couple of times to

play it through, but always ended up in tears. This was of course a response not so much to the pseudo-tragedy as to my own wonder at its superlative unity of form. But here you may detect a touch of self-glorification, which no doubt will soon pass and leave in its place the usual self-critical hangover.”

“Composers often do not hear the music that is being played … We are listening to something and at the same time creating something else.”

It worked when it was new, but it became stale. Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.

Many composers of the early avant-garde period witnessed horrific things in their youth.

In secret, Ligeti dabbled in twelve-tone writing, though his understanding of the method was gleaned haphazardly from the pages of Mann’s Doctor Faustus,

The dominant process in Ligeti’s music is one of emergence—shapes come out of the shadows, dark cedes to light.

while the maverick rock star Frank Zappa spoke of his teenage love for the music of Edgard Varèse, whom he once looked up in the phone book and called out of the blue.

It was a purely American art, free of modernist anxiety and inflected with pop optimism. Reich said: “Schoenberg gives a very honest musical portrayal of his times. I salute him—but I don’t want to write like him. Stockhausen, Berio, and Boulez were portraying in very honest terms what it was like to pick up the pieces of a bombed-out continent after World War II. But for some American in 1948 or 1958 or 1968—in the real context

of tail fins, Chuck Berry, and millions of burgers sold—to pretend that instead we’re really going to have the dark-brown Angst of Vienna is a lie, a musical lie…”

Harrison, a gentle soul in a century of sacred monsters, was born in 1917,

Teacher and student would have long arguments about music’s role in society; once, when Wolpe pointed out the window of his Greenwich Village studio and exclaimed that one must write

for the man in the street, Feldman looked down and saw, to his ironic delight, Jackson Pollock walking by.

As these works were being written, the Berkeley music department awarded Young a travel fellowship—according to legend, to get him out of town.

am interested in perceptible processes,” he wrote. “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding

music.”

As Reich commented to Edward Strickland, the ending of the piece is contained within the opening chord, so that it is a matter not of traveling from one place to another but of uncovering

the destination inside the point of departure.

The two minimalists briefly formed a company called Chelsea Light Moving and eked out a wage carrying furniture up and down the

narrow staircases of New York walk-ups.

To the cynical onlooker, orchestras and opera houses are stuck in a museum culture, playing to a dwindling cohort of aging subscribers and would-be elitists who take satisfaction from technically expert if soulless renditions of Hitler’s favorite works.

Even Boulez has recalibrated a few of his more extreme positions. When, in 1999, he was asked why so few major works of the fifties and sixties had become repertory pieces, he blandly

replied, “Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener.”

The score makes extravagant demands; as of this writing, no opera house has yet succeeded in staging Wednesday, whose third scene calls for four string players to take off in helicopters.

Music history is too often treated as a kind of Mercator projection

of the globe, a flat image representing a landscape that is in reality borderless and continuous.

They are seeking the middle ground between the life of the mind and the noise of the street.