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Zusammenfassung von The Rest Is Noise

Name: The Rest Is Noise
Rating: 4.3 (43 reviews)
Author: Alex Ross

Alex Ross

Listening to the Twentieth Century

4.3 (43 Bewertungen)

34 Min.

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The Rest Is Noise
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What’s in it for me? Rediscover the history of the twentieth century through modern classical music.

One question that has remained close to musical scholars and critics, is whether a piece of music can exist purely on its own, separate from the time and context from which it came. Perhaps one of the best examples of this question is the work of Richard Wagner, a German composer who died in 1883. Wagner left behind anti-Semitic writing and his musical works were subsequently hailed as the pinnacle of music by Adolf Hitler.

Wagner was also hailed as a genius by many music critics of his day and proved to be massively popular with the average listener, and so his shadow loomed large over music at the beginning of the twentieth century. As you’ll discover, the evolution of music from lavish Wagner operas to the minimalist sounds of Steve Reich is also the story of what was happening around these composers at the time. As politics grew more extremely divided and wars raged, the sound of contemporary music reflects these changes and tells the story of a people reckoning with their past and attempting to chart a way forward.

In these blinks you’ll find out

how a scandal in Vienna ushered in atonal music;
how a Stravinsky ballet transformed the music scene in Paris; and
how a postwar German music school ended up influencing popular music.

Under the long shadow of Wagner, modern classical music took a bold step forward with the work of Richard Strauss.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, music lovers across Europe were still under the spell of Richard Wagner. By 1900, the composer had been dead for over 15 years, but his operas had been so lavish and grandiose that they’d become the height of entertainment.

In Bayreuth, Germany, when Wagner debuted his four-part opera series known as the Ring cycle in 1876, royalty and the upper crust of culture from around Europe attended, including other composers such as Tchaikovsky and Franz Liszt. The event was such a remarkable occasion that the New York Times ran stories on it for days. Wagner was essentially the blockbuster producer of his day.

The next generation of composers, who were hitting their stride at the start of the new century, had grown up under Wagner’s considerable influence. This included giants of Austro-German music such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.

Strauss can be seen as a leading voice in shaping the music that was to come in the wake of Wagner’s grandiose and opulent work. Strauss’s 1896 work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, essentially announces a new dawn arriving, the music rising and shimmering as it uses the natural harmonic series. Trumpets play C, G, and then a higher C; the intervals between the notes conform to natural ratios on the frequency spectrum and so sound pleasing to the ears. If you’ve seen the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, you’ll immediately recognize these “rising” notes; during the opening scene of the film, they’re memorably used to herald a new beginning for mankind.

On May 16, 1906, Strauss’s new operatic work Salome was performed in Graz, Austria, and it heralded a new direction. Like Zarathustra, Salome grabs the listener from the very beginning, but this time the choice of notes and progressions is used to an entirely different end. Within the first few seconds, the listener is subjected to a scale that starts off in C-sharp major, but quickly changes to G-major – a completely unrelated key, causing immediate dissonance. What’s more, this quick switch involves the interval of a tritone, which is also known among music scholars as diabolus in musica, or “the devil in music.”

Human ears don’t respond well to the tritone, since it juxtaposes two very different harmonic spheres. Because of Strauss’s liberal use of such dissonances – musical devices which go against traditional musical harmony – Salome was received with shock that was either of excitement or disgust, depending on the individual.

Mahler's Sixth Symphony approached the avant-garde differently than Strauss's Salome.

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.

A radical, dissonant and influential voice emerged in Vienna with Schoenberg.

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.

Stravinsky rocketed to fame with The Firebird and The Rite of Spring.

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.

Europe hungered for a new post-World War I sound, which emerged in Paris, along with a jazz influence.

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.

In the US, where classical music has European connotations, many composers played jazz or wrote for Broadway.

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 pre-World War II Berlin, the politics of musical styles reflected the deep divides in society.

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.

Politics also influenced music in Stalinist Russia and an America uneasy about Communism.

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.

In FDR’s America, composers debated about what kind of music should be made as an influx of European refugees arrived.

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.

Post-war Germany saw the creation of the Darmstadt School, while the avant-garde grew more aggressive.

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.

Minimalism sprung from the American West Coast and took hold in New York’s bohemian art scene.

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.

John Cage deconstructed classical composition as minimalism offered a way forward.

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.

Twentieth-century classical music’s influence can still be found in today’s eclectic pop music.

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.

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Worum geht es in The Rest Is Noise?

The Rest Is Noise (2011) takes you on a musical journey through the twentieth century, from the game-changing work of Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky to the minimalist compositions of John Cale and Philip Glass. Author Alex Ross puts modern classical music into eye-opening perspective, chronicling the revolutionary changes and how they were influenced by the tumultuous events of the 1900s.

Wer The Rest Is Noise lesen sollte

Music buffs and fans of classical music
Anyone interested in the history of the twentieth century
Scholars of contemporary art

Über den Autor

Alex Ross has been The New Yorker’s music critic for over 20 years. His writing has earned him multiple awards, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Rest Is Noise is his first book and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

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