The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

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.

A self-styled artist-prophet in the fin-de-siècle mode,

I want someone to make me music that I can live in like a house.”

The American critic Paul Rosenfeld, an orotund advocate of avant-garde music in the twenties and thirties, identified these artists as avatars of “skyscraper mysticism,” by which he meant a “feeling of the unity of life through the forms and expression of industrial civilization, its fierce lights, piercing noises, compact and synthetic textures; a feeling of its immense tension, dynamism, ferocity, and also its fabulous delicacy and precision.”

Helene Berg knew of the situation. After her husband’s death she wrote to Alma, “Alban invented an excuse to keep his poetic passion within those boundaries which he himself desired. He himself constructed obstacles and thereby created the romanticism which he required.”

Schulhoff’s career neatly maps the early twentieth century: he started off writing in a Romantic, folk-inflected style, then took up jazz piano and indulged in Dada provocations (his sardonic Symphonia germanica has a singer shrieking “Deutschland über alles” while a pianist bangs out dissonances).

Walter Benjamin, who wrote that fascist humanity would “experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.”

Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov. “He’s hep on music and tells the Krauts how to go about it,” one military man said of this ebullient, charming, and slippery personality.

With the coming of OMGUS, Psychological Warfare evolved into Information Control,

The emotional content of the music is elusive. The feeling of delirium wears off after a few minutes, giving way to a kind of objectified, mechanized savagery. The serialist principle, with its surfeit of ever-changing musical data, has the effect of erasing at any given moment whatever impressions the listener may have formed about previous passages in the piece. The present moment is all there is. Boulez’s early works, notably the two Sonatas, Structures, and Le Visage nuptial, are perhaps best understood not as intellectual experiences but as athletic, even cerebrally sexual ones. Michel Foucault, the great theorist of power and sexuality, seemed almost turned on by Boulez’s music, and for a time he was the lover of Boulez’s fellow serialist Barraqué. “They represented for me the first ‘tear’ in the dialectical universe in which I had lived,” Foucault said of the serialists. What drove Boulez’s own rage for order remains unknown.

The final breakthrough was the premiere of 49330, the so-called silent piece, on August 29, in the upstate New York town of Woodstock. Cage later said that he had been inspired to write 49330 after seeing a group of all-white Rauschenberg canvases at Black Mountain the previous year. “Music is lagging,” he thought to himself, on encountering Rauschenberg’s work. In fact, he had already experimented with spells of silence in Music of Changes, and, back in 1948, he had talked about writing a four-and-a-half-minute soundless piece titled Silent Prayer. Rauschenberg simply emboldened him to do the unthinkable. The original score was written out on conventional music paper, tempo=60, in three movements. David Tudor walked onstage, sat down at the piano, opened the piano lid, and did nothing, except to close the lid and open it again at the beginning of each subsequent movement. The music was the sound of the surrounding space. It was at once a head-spinning philosophical statement and a Zen-like ritual of contemplation. It was a piece that anyone could have written, as skeptics never failed to point out, but, as Cage seldom failed to respond, no one else did.

The choreographer dreamed of summoning forth the definitive Stravinsky ballet—as Kirstein put it, “a ballet which would seem to be the enormous finale of a ballet to end all the ballets the world has ever seen.”

The twentieth century was unquestionably a terrible time in human history—“the century of death,” Leonard Bernstein called it—but proximity to terror does not obligate the artist to make terror his subject. Theodor Adorno, who helped to write the musical passages in Doctor Faustus, saw modernism and kitsch as polar opposites, yet even he admitted that modernism can bring forth its own kind of kitsch—a melodrama of difficulty that easily degenerates into a sort of superannuated adolescent angst. Georg Lukács, in a critique of Adorno, remarked that the philosopher resided in a “Grand Hotel Abyss,” from whose aestheticized security he gazed on the agony of man as if it were an Alpine vista.

Maybe this New York–born composer would have found his way even if he had never left the East Coast, but his move westward brought him into contact with alternative American traditions that had been developing in relative isolation since the second decade of the century, with sporadic infusions from the European émigrés who had come to Los Angeles in the thirties and forties. In fact, the circuitous chain of events that led to minimalism began with a kind of California mutation of the Second Viennese School.

In the name of Fluxus, violins were smashed (Nam June Paik’s One for Violin Solo, 1962), pianos were dismantled (Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, 1962), and Stockhausen concerts were picketed (Henry Flynt employed the slogan “STOCKHAUSEN—PATRICIAN ‘THEORIST’ OF WHITE SUPREMACY: GO TO HELL!” in 1964).

The spirit of “downtown” also crossed the flat spaces of the Midwest, touching down in the university towns of Oberlin, Ann Arbor, Champaign-Urbana, and Iowa City. Gann calls experimentalists in these places the “I-80 avant-garde,” after the interstate highway that cuts across the upper Midwest.

In Music for Solo Performer (1965), Lucier made himself a kind of mind-control test subject by attaching electrodes to his head and broadcasting his brain’s alpha waves to loudspeakers around the room, the low-frequency tones causing nearby percussion instruments to vibrate. For I am sitting in a room (1969), Lucier recorded himself reciting the following text: “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.” The piece simply enacts that process.

The San Francisco Tape Music Center started up in 1961 under the aegis of the San Francisco Conservatory, but was thrown off the premises after a concert in which, as Gann writes, “dancers went around spraying the audience with perfume as a found tape was played of a woman talking to her minister about her out-of-wedlock baby.”

Subotnick’s 1967 synthesizer rhapsody Silver Apples of the Moon became a surprise bestseller on the Nonesuch label, its alternately abstract and propulsive swirls of synthesized sound entrancing college kids of the Beatles generation. But perhaps the most significant of the Tape Center’s activities was a performance that it hosted in 1964: the premiere of Terry Riley’s In C.

As Reich once said, in an ingenious aphorism, “All music turns out to be ethnic music.” The composer becomes an antenna receiving signals, a satellite gathering messages from around the globe.

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.”