The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

Moreover, only in a prosperous, liberal, art-infatuated society could such a determinedly antisocial class of artists survive, or find an audience. 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.

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.

Schoenberg, in his worst moods, completely inverted the formula, implying, in effect, that the voice of the people was the voice of the devil. “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.

Yet a life of experiment was not to Satie’s liking. The son of a publisher of music-hall and cabaret songs, he found deeper satisfaction in playing piano at the Auberge du Clou. He achieved liberation from the past in three piano pieces titled Gymnopédies, which discard centuries of knotted-brow complexity in favor of a language at once simple and new. In the first eighteen bars of the first piece, only six pitches are used. There is no development, no transition, only an instant prolonged.

Schoenberg applied the concept of degeneration to music. He introduced a theme that would reappear often as the century went on—the idea that some musical languages were healthy while others were degenerate, that true composers required a pure place in a polluted world, that only by assuming a militant asceticism could they withstand the almost sexual allure of dubious chords.

“This book I have learned from my pupils,” Schoenberg wrote at the top of the first page of Harmonielehre. With Webern and Berg he was able to form a common front, which eventually became known as the Second Viennese School—the first having supposedly consisted of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

“That is no country for old men,” William Butler Yeats cries in “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Dvořák had assumed that American music would come into its own when it succeeded in importing African-American material into European form, but in the end the opposite thing happened: African-American composers appropriated European material into self-invented forms of blues and jazz.

The annual Finnish expenditure on the arts is roughly two hundred times per capita what the U.S. government spends on the National Endowment for the Arts.

Edwin Bechstein, the renowned piano manufacturer, and Hugo Bruckmann, the publisher who printed the works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, both welcomed Hitler into their salons.