Music Books for Grownups: 'The Rest Is Noise'
Alex Ross's hefty and wonderful new book, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," begins with an almost literal cliff-hanger: Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler visiting a waterfall and enjoying lunch prior to Strauss conducting his opera "Salome" that evening in the Austrian city of Granz. That bucolic scene sets the stage for a wild, densely plotted ride through a century's worth of creative jousting among the (gotta say it) exclusively white and male titans of classical music. The New Yorker magazine's music critic has a brilliant knack for distilling entire careers into elegant portraits, which he etches into the epic context of a world descending into war and fascism before reemerging into something new and strange and yet to be resolved. This passage about Béla Bartók's "Concerto for Orchestra" (1942-45) offers a nice example of how Ross illuminates a specific work within a much larger exhibition:
The Concerto might be a tribute to the pluralism that Roosevelt's America in its ideal form embodied. There are folk melodies of the Hungarian, Romanian, and Czech peasant traditions, Gypsy dances, North African rhythms, echoes of both the impressionism of Debussy and the expressionism of Schoenberg (they are unified in the Elegy movement), Stravinsky's Rite, and, riding high above, pealing fanfares of all-American brass. Ridicule aside, the Shostakovich quotation adds to the polyglot diversity of the piece. Almost every instrument in the orchestra has a solo role, even as the collective emotion swells. Bartók's parting gift to his adopted country—he died on September 26, 1945—is a portrait of democracy in action.
Ross also has a nice piece in this week's New Yorker about blogging and the online world of classical music. "Some recent articles have asked whether the Internet can save classical music," he writes in "The Well-Tempered Web," a piece linking to loads of interesting sites. He continues, "Classical music is, in fact, saving itself; Internet activity is merely the most immediately visible evidence of its refusal to fade away."