Thoughts on Twentieth-Century Noise

Accustomed as I am to reading books on the internet, it requires a great deal of effort to read a printed book. My aunt L. queried once whether this practice is not degrading to the intellect, or something to that effect. But honestly I like reading on the internet because whatever the material is feels more alive and immediate that way, and I can scroll over the verbal dead weight or passages I don't much like, and read faster in general because there's no need to turn pages (depending on the document format, of course). The problem with books or articles is, at least in my experience, that they can be dull and meaningless if they are not illumined by one's experience, or explained a little by a friend or relative or someone else who is qualified by their experience, different perspective, or superior intelligence to speak of it. But somehow this problem is not as acute on the internet, perhaps also because I can look up secondary literature, relevant online encyclopaedia articles and pictures, etc., really easily.

In any case, the printed book I am presently slogging through (though I have dozens of started books lying around the bed) is Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, a birthday present from my godfather. I intend to write about it on the Lighthouse blog at some point, but in the meantime I want to ramble about it, not ex cathedra (as it were), but just informally. I'm only on the eighty-somethingth page in the nearly telephone-width volume (the print is large) anyway.

First I'll begin by saying that by and large I find 20th century art unsympathetic, with its pessimistic view of reality, restrictive minimalism, and incarnation of the very inhumanity which it is often intended to protest or counteract. There are all sorts of exceptions to this rule, and if someone explains the appeal of 20th century art to me in intellectual terms I can kind of understand it (if only on the intellectual level, because conscious tolerance is as a rule neither very profound nor lasting). But it still isn't my thing.

One aspect of The Rest is Noise which I like very much is that Ross brings out the humanity of this epoch, the composers, and the music, even when these composers and music have rather cold and hyperintellectual tendencies. Rather than striding into the material with arrogance and prejudice, arraigning one set of composers whilst praising the other, stating absolutely that this artistic movement is superior to that, or characterizing the human subjects with more boldness than accuracy, he practices good old-fashioned American neutrality, attentively following the arguments and recognizing the merits of all sides, and refusing even after coming to a fair and sensible assessment to pronounce an inviolable judgment on the entire affair. Which is refreshing because the European approach does tend to be very dogmatic; and entertaining as this dogmatism can be especially in its aphoristic phases, after the first glow of admiration has passed it is irritating to find one's self left with only a healthy sense of skepticism and a highly biased knowledge of the truth.

In any case, Ross begins by immersing the reader in the Viennese school, as well as the composers who drifted in and out of the Austrian capital. Salome is one of the first works discussed, and even though I don't know the music well, I was quite interested because I've read the libretto repeatedly as Oscar Wilde's play. Whether I'd want to listen to it or read the play again is another question. On the one hand literature and music and so on are only harmful if one lacks common sense; on the other hand common sense only goes so deep, and I like to be a bit selective about the thoughts and images and information that enter and will presumably muck around in my subconscious for the rest of my life. Besides which there's no need — it's even insensitive and stupid — to probe into the realm of misery and darkness when these feelings are rife enough anyway.

Biographies of figures like Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg are woven unaffectedly into the narrative, and numerous anecdotes illustrate clearly enough the childish games (jealousy, covetousness, backbiting, etc.) in which the so-called adults of Vienna's music world liked to engage. Ross doesn't go, or hasn't gone as far as I've read, into salacious detail about their carnal relationships, which is a relief because I have never been convinced that biographers and other writers who thrive on such detail are really highmindedly providing psychological insights rather than just gossip-mongering, prying, and perhaps compensating for their own comparatively unadventurous existence by roaming vicariously. Either way, it's impressive how much research clearly went into the book, and though the trivia interspersed in the text often feel like footnotes, it's also impressive how well Ross has synthesized and filtered the research.

A year or so ago I read Schöpfer der Neuen Musik by H. H. Stuckenschmidt, which covers roughly the same ground. Though Stuckenschmidt was in top form when he was writing about Debussy and Ravel (he integrated the information about their background, education, interests, personality, and compositional philosophy so well into his descriptions of their music that a good reader could probably recognize their compositions even without seeing or hearing a single note of them previously), by the time that Berg and Milhaud came along the chapters had dwindled to dry and rather pitiful music-theoretical synopses of the composers' works. (I'm probably exaggerating, but still, only a very enthusiastic reader would enjoy the book's home stretch.) Besides which, despite my admiration for Stuckenschmidt's brilliant mind and his devotion to 20th-century music, I had major issues with the book's structure and the author's pompous use of language — for instance idiotic compound adjectives in the vein of künstlerisch-schöpferish and natürlich-ästhetisch — and have therefore recused myself from indicting any serious review of the book. It would be unfair to say outright that one book is better than the other; certainly Ross's is friendlier.

Perhaps my biggest quibble with Ross's book is that the style would be better suited to a series of articles — the sentence structure streamlined and simplified as a newspaper or magazine article would demand it, and the concepts and information pared down to cater to the apparently drosophilic attention spans and preadolescent understandings of the readers. I wish that it were more condensed and enigmatic, as is in my view more appropriate given the scope of a book. On the other hand, one of the charms of Alex Ross's style is precisely that it is unpretending, genuine, and perfectly expressed in its efficient way. (And I like his articles in the New Yorker precisely because they are free from pretention and cattiness.) And non-fiction books are, it seems, rarely condensed and enigmatic anyway.

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Here is a link to Alex Ross's old blog:
The Rest is Noise
and his new blog, at the New Yorker:
Unquiet Thoughts