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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Alex Ross
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October 30, 2020 - May 25, 2021
Ultimately, all music acts on its audience through the same physics of sound, shaking the air and arousing curious sensations.
Their son was, like many survivors of troubled families, determined to maintain a cool, composed facade, behind which weird fires burned.
He also codified the etiquette of the modern concert experience, with its worshipful, pseudo-religious character. Opera houses of the nineteenth century were rowdy places; Mahler, who hated all extraneous noise, threw out singers’ fan clubs, cut short applause between numbers, glared icily at talkative concertgoers, and forced latecomers to wait in the lobby.
So Mahler made concert goers uptight and devoted to a pure music experience. I thunk I’m more of a rowdy type, especially during my old drinking days.
Can a man win fame in his own time while also remaining a true artist?
“I have found that people in general are better, more kindly, than one supposes.”
Each man misunderstood the other to the end; Strauss suspected Mahler of surrendering to antiquated Christian morality, while Mahler accused Strauss of selling out to plebeian taste. The split between them forecast a larger division in twentieth-century music to come, between modernist and populist conceptions of the composer’s role.
The cultish fanaticism of modern art turns out to be not unrelated to the politics of fascism: both attempt to remake the world in utopian forms.
“Great art, as the Devil maintains, can now only be produced, in this declining society, through complete isolation, loneliness, through complete heartlessness … [Yet Mann] allows Leverkühn to dream of a new time, when music will again to a certain extent be on first-name terms with the people.”
end of the century, combined with sense of degeneracy and new hope
Schoenberg’s music no longer carries the threat that all music will sound like this. Still, it retains its Faustian aura. These intervals will always shake the air; they will never become second nature.
In his early stories Thomas Mann produced several lively portraits of a widespread turn-of-the-century type, the apocalyptic aesthete.
The bourgeois worship of art had implanted in artists’ minds an attitude of infallibility, according to which the imagination made its own laws. That mentality made possible the extremes of modern art.
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.
“If it is art, it is not for all,” he later wrote, “and if it is for all, it is not art.” Did the split between the composer and his public come about as the result of such ferocious attitudes? Or were they a rational response to the public’s irrational vitriol? These questions admit no ready answers. Both sides of the dispute bore some degree of responsibility for the unsightly outcome. Fin-de-siècle Vienna offers the depressing spectacle of artists and audiences washing their hands of each other, giving up on the dream of common ground.
Schoenberg was not the first composer to write “atonal music,” if it is defined as music outside the major- and minor-key system.
The fabric of harmony was warping, as if under the influence of an unseen force.
Charles Baudelaire struck all the poses of the artist in opposition to society, in terms of dress, behavior, sexual mores, choice of subject, and style of delivery.
Debussy’s sense of himself as a sonic adventurer, a Faustian seeker, dissipated. By 1900 he was no longer calling for a Society of Musical Esotericism; instead, he prized classic French values of clarity, elegance, and grace.
an alternative modernism, one that would reach maturity in the stripped-down, folk-based, jazz-happy, machine-driven music of the twenties.
two avant-gardes were forming side by side. The Parisians were moving into the brightly lit world of daily life. The Viennese went in the opposite direction, illuminating the terrible depths with their holy torches.
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.
The theme is a row of twelve notes, which serves to represent the character’s ruthless rationality, his urge to reduce humans to data. The Doctor even sings a little aria to his intellect at the end: “Oh my theory! Oh my fame!”
Stravinsky was giving voice not to ancient instincts but to the bloodthirstiness of the contemporary West. At the turn of the century, purportedly civilized societies were singling out scapegoats on whom the ills of modernity could be blamed: Russian townspeople were enacting pogroms of Jews, white Americans were lynching young black men, and, closer to home, the denizens of the sixteenth arrondissement had cheered on the anti-Semitic campaign against the Jewish patriot Alfred Dreyfus.
“Le Train bleu is more than a frivolous work,” Cocteau said. “It is a monument to frivolity!”
amused himself by adopting the flat-toned, inexpressive jargon of a researcher defending his experiments to fellow experts:
Avoid the tone of a researcher
The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his book The Age of Extremes, writes that the economic boom was largely illusory, underwritten by a shaky network of international loans and undermined by widespread unemployment. Music, too, seemed trapped in a bubble economy; a composer could make his name with one or two attention-getting gestures but had a harder time sustaining a career.
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!”
Among them were Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, who made art from everyday objects and eroticized the machine.
A gap had opened up between the ideal of modernism as the antithesis of mass culture and the reality of America as a marketplace in which absolutely anything could be bought and sold.
“Not everyone can be an ‘innovating genius,’” he wrote one day in his diary. “As a personality and ‘eine Erscheinung aus den Wäldern’ [apparition from the woods] you will have your small, modest place.”
It would have been more productive to show what the two composers had in common, rather than using one as a stick to beat the other.
“I’ve had indescribable experiences the last few days,” he wrote to his parents. What he saw on the ground led him to make a perceptive comment, which historians of the Weimar period have confirmed: the moderate elements lacked power and influence, so the extremes of the left and the right were setting the tone and the agenda. This was an ominous note on which to inaugurate a republic.
“Nothing was so mad or so atrocious that it could have caused any awe in people anymore,” Thomas Mann
New Objectivity—a form of expression “neither Impressionistically vague nor Expressionistically abstract, neither sensuously superficial nor constructivistically introverted.”
“Music for use” and educational music went hand in hand with what Peter Gay has called Weimar’s “hunger for wholeness”: its obsessive pursuit of arts-and-crafts projects, physical culture, back-to-nature expeditions, youth movements, sing-alongs, and so on.
Franz Schreker, who, back in 1912, had unveiled a remarkable work titled Der ferne Klang, or The Distant Sound. The story of that opera is essentially the story of this book: the cultural predicament of the composer in the twentieth century.
Busoni was a cosmopolitan in a nationalist age, a pragmatist in an era of aesthetic absolutism.
Like so many Romantics and modernists before him, Busoni idolized the figure of Faust, but he delighted more in the science of magic than in the theory of heaven and hell.
In the spirit of Brecht and Weill, Dylan proceeded to carve his own Gestus-like phrases into the minds of late-twentieth-century listeners: “The answer is blowin’ in the wind,” “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall,” “The times they are a-changin’.” The last was a direct quotation from one of Brecht’s lyrics for Hanns Eisler. The spirit of Berlin played on.
The period from the mid-thirties onward marked the onset of the most warped and tragic phase in twentieth-century music: the total politicizing of the art by totalitarian means.
The Love of Three Oranges, using an adaptation that Meyerhold had made for his experimental studio in the years before the revolution. This was “estrangement” in a lighthearted vein: in the Prologue, Tragedians, Comedians, Romantics, Eccentrics, and Empty-Heads debate among themselves what genre of entertainment should be performed, and as the fairy-tale plot plays out, they periodically intrude to offer observations and criticisms.
Stravinsky, Prokofiev commented, “frightfully desires his creativity to adhere to modernity. If I want anything, it’s that modernity should adhere to my creativity.”
Back in 1915, the critic Van Wyck Brooks had complained that America was caught in a false dichotomy between “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” between “academic pedantry and pavement slang.” He called for a middle-ground culture that would fuse intellectual substance with communicative power.
The middlebrow ideal was to be sophisticated without being pretentious, worldly but not effete, and classical music with an American accent fit the bill.
Copland’s music making liberal use of plainspoken melody and pure-hearted harmony. Then industry invades. “Smoke makes prosperity,” the narrator intones, “no matter if you choke on it.”
Schoenberg had a house on North Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood, down the way from Tyrone Power. Stravinsky lived on North Wetherly Drive, up the hill from the Sunset Strip. Rachmaninov was on North Elm Drive, in the center of the movie colony. Bruno Walter was on North Bedford Drive, next door to Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel; Theodor Adorno on South Kenter Avenue in Brentwood, near the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky; Otto Klemperer, former head of the Kroll Opera, on Bel Air Road, up the street from the directors Otto Preminger and Ernst Lubitsch; and Eisler on Amalfi Drive, in Pacific Palisades,
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the Weimar Republic, with its health fads and cult of sport, prepared him well for the Republic of California.
The automatic equation of radical style with liberal politics and of conservative style with reactionary politics is a historical myth that does little justice to an agonizingly ambiguous historical reality.
Walter Benjamin, who wrote that fascist humanity would “experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.”
“It seems that once the violent has been accepted,” he grumbled in a letter, “the amiable, in turn, is no longer tolerable.”
