Twentieth-century classical composition, the subject of this book, sounds like noise to many. It is a largely untamed art, an unassimilated underground. While the splattered abstractions of Jackson Pollock sell on the art market for a hundred million dollars or more, and while experimental works by Matthew Barney or David Lynch are analyzed in college dorms across the land, the equivalent in music still sends ripples of unease through concert audiences and makes little perceptible impact on the outside world. Classical music is stereotyped as an art of the dead, a repertory that begins with Bach and terminates with Mahler and Puccini. People are sometimes surprised to learn that composers are still writing at all.
Yet these sounds are hardly alien. Atonal chords crop up in jazz; avant-garde sounds appear in Hollywood film scores; minimalism has marked rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward. Sometimes the music resembles noise because it is noise, or near to it, by design. Sometimes, as with Berg’s Wozzeck, it mixes the familiar and the strange, consonance and dissonance. Sometimes it is so singularly beautiful that people gasp in wonder when they hear it. Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, with its grandly singing lines and gently ringing chords, stops time with each performance.
Because composers have infiltrated every aspect of modern existence, their work can be depicted only on the largest possible canvas. The Rest Is Noise chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written; the intellectuals who attempted to adjudicate style; the writers, painters, dancers, and filmmakers who provided companionship on lonely roads of exploration; the audiences who variously reveled in, reviled, or ignored what composers were doing; the technologies that changed how music was made and heard; and the revolutions, hot and cold wars, waves of emigration, and deeper social transformations that reshaped the landscape in which composers worked.
What the march of history really has to do with music itself is the subject of sharp debate. In the classical field it has long been fashionable to fence music off from society, to declare it a self-sufficient language. In the hyper-political twentieth century, that barrier crumbles time and again: Béla Bartók writes string quartets inspired by field recordings of Transylvanian folk songs, Shostakovich works on his Leningrad Symphony while German guns are firing on the city, John Adams creates an opera starring Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. Nevertheless, articulating the connection between music and the outer world remains devilishly difficult. Musical meaning is vague, mutable, and, in the end, deeply personal. Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history. My subtitle is meant literally; this is the twentieth century heard through its music.
Histories of music since 1900 often take the form of a teleological tale, a goal-obsessed narrative full of great leaps forward and heroic battles with the philistine bourgeoisie. When the concept of progress assumes exaggerated importance, many works are struck from the historical record on the grounds that they have nothing new to say. These pieces often happen to be those that have found a broader public—the symphonies of Sibelius and Shostakovich, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Carl Orff’s Carmina burana. Two distinct repertories have formed, one intellectual and one popular. Here they are merged: no language is considered intrinsically more modern than any other.
In the same way, the story criss-crosses the often ill-defined or imaginary border separating classical music from neighboring genres. Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, the Beatles, and the Velvet Underground have substantial walk-on roles, as the conversation between Gershwin and Berg goes on from generation to generation. Berg was right: music unfolds along an unbroken continuum, however dissimilar the sounds on the surface. Music is always migrating from its point of origin to its destiny in someone’s fleeting moment of experience—last night’s concert, tomorrow’s solitary jog.
The Rest Is Noise is written not just for those well versed in classical music but also—especially—for those who feel passing curiosity about this obscure pandemonium on the outskirts of culture. I approach the subject from multiple angles: biography, musical description, cultural and social history, evocations of place, raw politics, firsthand accounts by the participants themselves. Each chapter cuts a wide swath through a given period, but there is no attempt to be comprehensive: certain careers stand in for entire scenes, certain key pieces stand in for entire careers, and much great music is left on the cutting-room floor.
A list of recommended recordings appears at the back, along with ac know ledg ments of the many brilliant scholars who assisted me and citations of the hundreds of books, articles, and archival resources that I consulted. More, including dozens of sound samples, can be found at www.therestisnoise.com. The abundant, benighted twentieth century is only beginning to be seen whole.
If you would like to hear some of the music discussed in these pages, a free audio companion is available at www.therestisnoise.com/audio. There you will find streaming samples arranged by chapter, along with links to audio-rich Web sites and other channels of direct access to the music. An iTunes playlist of twenty representative excerpts can be found at www.therestisnoise.com/playlist. For a glossary of musical terms go to www.therestisnoise.com/glossary.
I am ready, I feel free To cleave the ether on a novel flight, To novel spheres of pure activity.
—GOETHE, FAUST, PART I
Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siècle
When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to witness the event. The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and word had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale—an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by an Irish degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna.
Giacomo Puccini, the creator of La Bohème and Tosca, made a trip north to hear what “terribly cacophonous thing” his German rival had concocted. Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna Opera, attended with his wife, the beautiful and controversial Alma. The bold young composer Arnold Schoenberg arrived from Vienna with his brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky and no fewer than six of his pupils. One of them, Alban Berg, traveled with an older friend, who later recalled the “feverish impatience and boundless excitement” that all felt as the evening approached. The widow of Johann Strauss II, composer of On the Beautiful Blue Danube, represented old Vienna.
Ordinary music enthusiasts filled out the crowd—“young people from Vienna, with only the vocal score as hand luggage,” Richard Strauss noted. Among them may have been the seventeen-year-old Adolf