Evanston: the thing I can’t do: THE REST IS NOISE
Evanston: the thing I can’t do: THE REST IS NOISE
There are, of course, thousands of things I can’t do, but the only one I wish I could is make my own music. Music is the one essential part of my life at which I make no pretense of having any talent and am only audience. I watch sports, but that is mere pastime. Music is important. And I am fortunate to live in a time when I can carry hundreds of albums in my pocket from one part of my life and one side of the world to the other. As I have pointed out elsewhere in this journal only one hundred years ago the only way to hear music was to be in the physical presence of a musician or singer. My life would have been the poorer.
I have been thinking of this because I just finished reading, THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker magazine. Although jazz and rock and roll are mentioned, as well as a few of the present oddities of popular taste, the book isn’t about all music, but classical composition in the late and unlamented century.
If one judges a book by the action it inspires, THE REST IS NOISE is the most influential book I have read in a long time. It caused me to buy Montefiore’s other book on Stalin, IN THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR; order or download six albums: Kurt Weill’s THE THREEPENNY OPERA; John Adams’s NIXON IN CHINA; a compilation of short pieces by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern; a compilation of short pieces by Charles Ives called AN AMERICAN JOURNEY; Benjamin Britten’s opera, PETER GRIMES; and Shostakovich’s String Quartets No. 3, 7, 8; put PETER GRIMES and Anton Berg’s opera, Wozzeck in my Netflix queue; as well as look up a great poem, “Death Fugue,” by Paul Celan, which gives its name to the chapter on music under Naziism.
As history this book is excellent. Mr. Ross is widely read as well as widely listened. I was already familiar with much of what he wrote, as well as with most of the important music--at least in the first half of the century--but still found the writing enjoyable and informative.
I did not know for example that the first electrical recording of classical music was made in 1925, or that thanks to Hitler and Stalin many of the great names of classical music found themselves living within a few blocks of one another in Los Angeles about 1950, including Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Bruno Walter, Theodor Adorno, Gregor Piatiagorsky, Otto Klemperer. Non-musicians Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley were there too.
As criticism the book suffers from the weakness of all criticism by trying to express the inexpressible. If poetry is that which cannot be translated from one language to another, there is no reason why what is expressed in music or painting, should be describable in words. Sound certainly predates word, and I think our responses to music are on a non-verbal level. But then critics have to make a living, I suppose.
For anyone with an interest in classical music, THE REST IS NOISE is very highly recommended.
Thursday, January 10, 2008