harmonious

I think many if not most of us have experienced a moment when we needed to throw off the yoke of our past and begin anew, when who we’ve been stands in the way of our being who we are.  We may not always realize how much of the past we’ve sloughed off until visiting a relative or old friend who refuses to see how we’ve changed since we were children, but the constant passing away of our old self is part of how we survive, how we make our way in the world.  At the same time, the popularity of Facebook and social networking is how it enables us to reclaim and reconnect to our pasts, to find those we’ve always regretted losing touch with.  And we instinctively trust and respect those who remain connected to and comfortable with their past, calling them rooted and grounded.  In his highly-readable The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross shows how the history of twentieth-century classical music, as perhaps of all music, is the story of a continually-renewed conflict between these impulses: between the desire to jettison the past and the one to reclaim it.

Although he starts his book earlier, the typical conflict is that between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the former intent on moving music forward without reference to past glories through twelve-tone dissonance that turns its back on audiences and the latter cannily culling the history of classical and folk music for ways to carry on and please listeners with beauty.  And essentially the same dichotomy repeats itself throughout the century, with Boulez, Cage, and Stockhausen leading the obscurantist camp, and Britten, Bernstein, and Messian leading the harmonic crowd.  It wasn’t until the final third of the century that such dichotomies became outdated when the minimalists found ways to use dissonant notes to create lyrical beauty and reunited the two sides of musical composition.

It is this post-minimalist world that we now inhabit and that Ross, through his style and even-handed manner more than any other way, puts forward as the best possible state of affairs.  In Ross’s view we live in an ideal time for classical music, for all music.  Recordings are superb.  The internet makes music available to all.  And composers are free of the totalitarian necessity to be only one thing, as they were not for so much of the twentieth century, when dictators, political or musical, held so much power.  In the world as Alex Ross sees it, the composing world today, the past is always present but never restrictive, never limiting.  Composers are free to be atonal or harmonious, avant-garde or neoclassical, serious or popular, or more likely, both and all at the same time.  What a world!

I do have a few bones to pick with the rapturous reception his book has received.  While a book about classical music that is easy and fun to read is a novelty, and a welcome one, that fact alone doesn’t necessarily make it a great book.  I often found myself skimming through the descriptions of the music since with no music training or formal knowledge, they were essentially meaningless.  I would have appreciated a bit more effort to signal the significance of those descriptions.  What does it mean that a movement dances around a diminished seventh?  And more importantly, why does Ross think it important enough to tell me this detail.  Often I didn’t know why he chose the musical details he did.  As for the claims that the book relates the history of the twentieth century through music, that is simply false.  If you didn’t already know a great deal about the twentieth century and who and what the major forces and trends were, you wouldn’t know after reading this book.  Worse, you might not have even been able to follow the drift of its argument.

Still, it is highly readable and does successfully connect the history of twentieth century music to the history of the century itself, which is quite an achievement.  To do so in such an enjoyable package is well-worth the accolades and honors the book and Alex Ross have received.