Rockwell Matters: Episode Transcript (10/29/07)

Alex Ross has written a book. It's called The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century — which is a terrific subtitle — and I'm still a little confused about the title. Who, you might ask, is Alex Ross. Well, Alex Ross is the music critic of the New Yorker. I first met him when he was a stringer music critic at The New York Times, but he was very quickly snapped up by the ever prescient New Yorker. There's also a kind of funny connection with him and me and Peter G. Davis [music critic] in that we all went to Harvard and we all wrote or wanted to write our senior honor's theses or Master's theses on Richard Strauss. Peter's was rejected as being too contemporary by the then fusty music department at Harvard; mine was accepted on "Arabella," and Alex was going to write about "Salome" but then he was seduced into journalism. However, Strauss figures highly in his new book. It begins with a description of the beginning of "Salome."

I was on a panel with Alex and Linda Ronstadt in San Francisco recently and I stressed that I think this book is just wonderful. I then offered a few thoughts about it or questions about it. Most of the people that I talked to afterwards thought that I was undermining a false enthusiasm in revealing my true feelings by bringing up these issues. This is wrong. I really think it's a wonderful book. It's a wonderful book because it is essentially a history of twentieth century music deeply researched in terms of all of the contextual historical stuff, incredibly smart when it comes to standard harmonic analysis, and he leavens his harmonic analysis with wonderful vivid metaphors that mean that the general reader who might not get what it means to add a tritone to a triad will get it from the metaphorical descriptions.

So I think it's a terrific book. It has a highly personal take on music and I recommend it to everybody. Now that is sincere.

That said, I'm going to raise my issues. My issues are that as you might gather from leading off a book about twentieth music with Richard Strauss, Alex has a view of the twentieth century which is different from the standard modernist narrative as expounded by Theodor Adorno and most recently, although with equal brilliance and intelligence, reiterated in the twentieth century part of Richard Taruskin's six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. That arc is that modernism, twelve-tone music, dissonance, anger, despair at the horrors of the twentieth century is the dominant line of twentieth century music and that people like Strauss represented a holdover best swept away or ignored.

For Alex, the key composers in his narrative are Richard Strauss, Jean Sibelius, Dmitri Shostakovitch, Benjamin Britten, and Olivier Messiaen, which is powerfully weird. I mean, in his six volumes, I don't believe Taruskin mentions Sibelius and he skips over a lot of these others. Yet the view that Alex has, which is essentially that there is something healthy and physically natural about tonality and that the direct line going back to the nineteenth century and before is carried through the twentieth century as being the primary line, is intelligent, personal and well-argued even if you don't always agree with his holding back from the wilder shores of experimentation or artsy downtown minimalism. It does make you wonder a little about the title however, "The Rest is Noise." It's a play on "the rest is silence," but does he mean that the rest of music outside his narrative is just noise? He means it positively in some way.

Now he ends with a paean to the opening up of twentieth century music to all kinds of world music, popular music, jazz, etc., and yet his book is a book about Western classical music, that tradition and how it evolves. In some quarters, he's already been attacked as reiterating a sort of dead white European male position. I don't think that's fair. On the panel in San Francisco, he said that he held back from popular music because he just doesn't know enough about it. He likes art rock of the Bjork, Radiohead type, but he's nervous about the rest of it.

I hope, at some point, because it's my aesthetic, that he does open up to larger forms of music as he himself claims that classical music is itself doing now. But it's his book and it's his choice, and there is a viability to traditions and he has chosen to tell us what happened in the course of the twentieth century to the classical music tradition and what happened to it what it tells us about this century. It's a wonderful book. It's well worth reading.

 — John Rockwell