The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

The first notes on the clarinet are simply a rising scale, but it is split down the middle: the first half belongs to C-sharp major, the second half to G major. This is an unsettling opening, for several reasons. First, the notes C-sharp and G are separated by the interval known as the tritone, one half-step narrower than the perfect fifth. (Leonard Bernstein’s “Maria” opens with a tritone resolving to a fifth.) This interval has long caused uneasy vibrations in human ears; scholars called it diabolus in musica, the musical devil.

Seeking an alternative to Wagnerism, Strauss read the early-nineteenth-century anarchist thinker Max Stirner, whose book The Ego and Its Own argued that all forms of organized religion, as well as all organized societies, imprison individuals within illusions of morality, duty, and law.

All the while, Strauss continued to pursue the underlying theme of Guntram, the struggle of the individual against the collective.

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.

The august Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé defined poetry as a hermetic practice: “Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery.”

The young Debussy took that attitude as gospel. To his colleague Ernest Chausson he wrote in 1893: “Music really ought to have been a hermetical science, enshrined in texts so hard and laborious to decipher as to discourage the herd of people who treat it as casually as they do a handkerchief! I’d go further and, instead of spreading music among the populace, I propose the foundation of a ‘Society of Musical Esotericism …’”

afternoon faun

pelleas melisande

satie

Debussy, who, in 1901, remarked to his colleague Paul Dukas that too many modern works had become needlessly complex—“They smell of the lamp, not of the sun.”

schoenberg

erwartung

2 viennese school

wwi

Music became war carried on by other means.

Ezra Pound once said, “Stravinsky is the only living musician from whom I can learn my own job.”

Unlike a novel or a painting, a score gives up its full meaning only when it is performed in front of an audience; it is a child of loneliness that lives off crowds. Nameless terrors creep into the limbo between composition and performance, during which the score sits mutely on the desk.

“I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien,” Rachmaninov wrote in 1939. “I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me. Unlike Madame Butterfly with her quick religious conversions”—this is presumably Stravinsky—“I cannot cast out my musical gods in a moment and bend the knee to new ones.”

Yet, like so many Romantics before him, Sibelius took a perverse pleasure in surrendering to melancholy, finding joy in darkness. “Freudvoll und leidvoll,” he wrote in his diary—“Joyful and sorrowful.”

Nono’s signature piece was the choral work Il canto sospeso (1955–56),