The Rest Is Noise summary

Many big names, such as Puccini and Mahler, were present at the Graz performance of Salome. But the emerging composer Arnold Schoenberg was also in attendance with six of his devoted pupils, including Alban Berg. Schoenberg and Berg later became prominent and highly influential forces in what became known as the Second Viennese School of classical music.

At the start of 1906, Mahler and Strauss were quite close friends. But while Mahler was impressed with Salome, his own major work – his Sixth Symphony – premiered in the German town of Essen just eleven days later, on May 27. In it, Mahler attempts to push his boundaries as well. The first movement arrives in the traditional sonata form but contains two competing musical themes that eventually merge. The final fourth movement amplifies the idea of competing themes, with cascading waves of joyous fanfare battling chilling, militaristic marching beats.

In the early 1900s in Vienna, it was the duty of artists to show that not everything beneath the city’s gilded, gold, grandiose facade was beautiful. The values of the bourgeoisie were the target for many artists, but for composer Arnold Schoenberg, a radical, revolutionary style was a more personal necessity.

Schoenberg grew up in the Jewish community of Pressburg, in what is now Bratislava, Slovakia, and was mostly self-taught on the piano. In 1901, he moved to Berlin and then to Vienna the following year. By 1904 he’d amassed a group of disciples that included the composers Anton Webern and Alban Berg.

While the press may have been laughing about atonality, a “cult of Schoenberg” was developing among young Austro-German composers. Meanwhile, in Paris, a similar devoted following was forming around a composer of a different variety.

The Russian-born Igor Stravinsky was born to an aristocratic family of Polish and Russian descent. His upbringing included summer trips to Ustyluh, on the Polish-Ukrainian border, and it’s likely that Stravinsky was influenced early on by regional folk music – not unlike the kind of rhythmic, dance-oriented music that also influenced composers like Hungarian Béla Bartók, Frenchman Maurice Ravel, and Leoš Janáček, from what would become the Czech Republic. 

It wasn’t long after the premier of The Rite of Spring that Europe was thrown into the destructive violence of World War I. French, Russian, English, and Austro-German composers alike were caught up in either patriotism or their awareness of the devastation being caused by the war.

Prior to World War I, there was still a sense among the general public that the battlefield could be a noble place where pride and glory could be achieved. But this changed forever in the twentieth century, as war became a far more impersonal and devastating affair and the body count rose to unprecedented levels.

Meanwhile, in the United States, classical music has always been at something of a disadvantage. The idea that classical music is a European thing has long proliferated there, and ever since the country broke free of British rule, the average American listener has had a preference for homegrown music.

In the early twentieth century, ragtime, jazz, and blues music certainly fit this bill, both practically and in spirit. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t American composers creating strong work, despite the disadvantage of working in a European-dominated profession.

In the years following World War I, the always-influential German music scene found itself in an unusual place. In 1918, in the midst of the German Revolution, Kaiser Wilhelm II stepped down from the throne and fled the country, ushering Germany into something like democracy in an era now known as the Weimar Republic. But really, what followed the 1918 abdication was political turmoil that didn’t manage to fully stabilize in the decades ahead.

Starting in 1924, the chancellor and subsequent foreign minister Gustav Stresemann seemed to be the only official who could keep the extremist voices on the left and right from tipping the nation one way or the other. Unfortunately, he died in 1929. The music of the time seems to mirror this hostile political situation.

Many composers were stifled by the restrictions and machinations of the Soviet Russian regime, particularly in the 1930s and 40s, when Stalin’s powers were at their height. Interestingly enough, like Hitler, Stalin was a music lover.

Certainly, both Hitler and Stalin were well aware of the great musical legacies of their homelands, and both wanted to use music to advance their cause. For Stalin, this meant producing music that not only proved that the USSR was home to world-class composers, but was also consistent with the values of Soviet Communism.

By the time the US joined the Allied Forces in World War II, there were also politics of style arguments underway. What was music’s role in society? Should a composer be solely interested in advancing their craft, or should they be making music “to be of use,” like English composer Benjamin Britten once said of his ambitions.

The 1930s in the US were also a tumultuous time of trying to rebound from the Great Depression, while the growing popularity of radio allowed for new means of mass communication. President Franklin Roosevelt issued his massive New Deal project, which initially included a generous budget for supporting the arts.

The post-World War II music scene not only remained divisive, it grew even more so. Just as had happened after the First World War, there was a reckoning following the Second – certain music took on new connotations in the light of the war’s atrocities. The kind of bombastic music that was favored by dictators like Hitler, who loved the work of Wagner, were cast aside for new musical trends that carried no historical baggage.

In Germany and France, a new avant-garde rose up during the Cold War era and it was more strident and aggressive than ever before.

In the 1930s, many European composers fled to the US and some of them, like Schoenberg, found work teaching at universities. Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and other composers found the warm and sunny climate of California to be an agreeable new place to call home.

Many displaced composers found steady work writing music for Hollywood. And perhaps inspired by the flat desert landscape and the long and open roads, other composers were developing a new kind of avant-garde music that would be labeled as minimalism.

By the 1960s, techniques like twelve-tone and total serialism had seemingly taken formalism as far as it could go. Music had become as atonal, polyrhythmic, and discordant as it possibly could. So, in this way, minimalism can be seen as a natural response, a resetting of classical music composition that brought back a sense of space, tonality, and a more repetitive rhythm.

Perhaps the most audacious minimalist performance was Cage’s 4’33”, also known as his “silent” piece, in which the musicians performing it simply sit at their instruments and play no notes for approximately 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The “music” is the sound of the environment the performance is taking place in.

As the end of the twentieth century approached, musical influences from around the world were melding together and the progressive techniques of ambitious composers were making their way into popular music.

The Who gave a tip of the hat to contemporary classical music in their song “Baba O’Riley,” which takes its title from the psychedelic minimalist Terry Riley. And on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, there’s a photograph of the Darmstadt School’s Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose compositions and use of tape manipulations would inform the band’s more experimental songs. Before passing away in 2007, Stockhausen himself spent 26 years working on a composition entitled Licht, which is comprised of seven song cycles, one for each day of the week; he completed it in 2003.