Review: The Rest Is Noise — Listening to the 20th Century, by Alex Ross

Paulo Costa Lima – [email protected]
  Universidade Federal da Bahia

translated by Michael Kowalski

Translator’s note:

This review stands in sharp contrast to the uniformly positive reviews which The Rest is Noise received in the United States, many of which are excerpted in the American paperback edition. There are enough superlatives to fill several fly-leaves. Here are a few of the less giddy:

A benchmark book that should eventually become a classic of the 20th century.

Kirkus Review

The best book on what music is about—really about—that you will ever own.

Alan Rich, LA Weekly

Just occasionally someone writes a book you’ve waited your life to read. Alex Ross’s enthralling history of 20th-century music is, for me, one of those books.

Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian

By far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music.

Michael Kimmelman, New York Review of Books

To this chorus of hosannas Paulo Costa Lima has added a counterpoint of measured dissent. His critique strikes me as all the more pointed for its restraint. It should serve as the starting point for an overdue discussion of the astounding persistence of Anglo-European provincialism in classical music. The Vienna-Berlin-Rome-Paris-London-New York axis is not now, nor has it been for many decades, the sole site or arbiter of erudite musical development. To deal with all musical culture south of the Rio Grande in two perfunctory sentences is an insult, and to assign the musical cultures of Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina solely to the realm of pop smacks of orientalism. But Ross has sublimated his orientalism with such finesse that the book’s closing remarks concerning the possibility of the locus of classical music shifting to China come off sounding almost sincere. If only one didn’t suspect that Ross’s China scenario would continue to exclude Latin America, Africa, western Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Some people need their superheroes. Other people seem to need their supermetropolises. The rest is noise.

It’s clear to this reader that the ideology manifest in the spontaneous party-line reception for The Rest Is Noise in North America can only be addressed from the outside. Lima’s critique demands a close reading.

Review: The Rest Is Noise — Listening to the 20th Century, by Alex Ross

I have in my hand The Rest is Noise—Listening to the 20th Century, by Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, published in Brazil by the Companhia das Letras with great fanfare, in a technically perfect translation guaranteed to earn a place in the Flip awards² this year.

It’s a curious case, editorially speaking: a plunge into a musical tradition usually considered hermetic and avant-garde. To the extent that it renders its subject attractive it performs an important service. But at the same time, and in spite its having been a finalist for the Pulitzer, we have to state that, if it were a pack of cigarettes, it would have to carry the warning: “Culture alert: prejudicial to the image of your country.”

In 568 pages, in prose both modern and florid, Ross follows the careers of several dozen composers and describes several hundred works. He creates a meticulously elaborated tapestry, informing us of the escapades of Alma Mahler, the sexuality of Copland and Partch, Schoenberg’s suicide attempts, and the jealousies and rivalries of dozens of others. But there’s just two sentences about Villa-Lobos—they make an appearance in the story merely as a footnote to the artistic trajectory of Milhaud—and nothing else concerning other Brazilian composers.

In these same years the young Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was merging rhythmic ideas from Stravinsky with complex patterns that he had detected in Afro-Brazilian music. In neo-primitivist scores such as Amazonas and Uirapuru, Villa-Lobos wrote percussion parts of riotous intensity.

Two pages later, still in the same context, Ross adds:

[Milhaud] may also have heard Villa-Lobos speculating about common ground between Brazilian folk music and the classical canon—an idea that would eventually generate Villa-Lobos’s great sequence of Bachianas Brasileiras. [At least Ross grants them this modest bit of praise.]

To represent all of Brazilian music in two sentences is a scandal. And what should we have to say of the derogatory implications contained in such choice phrases as: ideas from Stravinsky, neo-primitivist, riotous intensity, and speculations?

Few authors could succeed in compromising—-so utterly, concisely, variously, and apparently inadvertently—-the intelligence of Villa-Lobos: the ideas allegedly copied, the music “riotous,” the cultural identity “neoprimitive” and hence false, the theoretical vision comprising mere “speculation.”

The author of Choros No. 8 can’t be confined within this straitjacket. The book betrays the author’s complete misunderstanding of Villa-Lobos. And bear in mind that the _Week of ‘22_² could easily have served as a reference point. That singular event called for some comment, providing as it did such a rare example of a nation embracing a new consciousness—one that had indisputable repercussions for the trajectory of Brazilian culture, including its popular music.

In spite of Ross giving us ample cause for an access of nationalist furor, it would be better not to take our critique down such a road, notwithstanding the fact that the author’s ignorance extends to many other countries and regions as well, and granting the fact that we’re dealing here with an outmoded historical model. No, the main problem is that the book doesn’t pick up on the 20th century’s systematic critique of the narrowness of the eurocentric canon: one of the century’s most impressive acts of overcoming. The book fails to take into account that the world has changed and that it no longer needs musty old histories centered around a single, unitary narrative.

Other parts of the planet, when they merit any attention, only manage to enter the story as very specific details embedded in peripheral contexts. Although though they deserve better treatment, they end up being absorbed into the central thesis of the masterpieces and geniuses of Europe and North America.

The author’s general posture, as well as the book’s emotional and critical appeal, is essentially grounded in the premise that it’s possible to transfer some of the aura of the 19th century to the 20th. Ross eroticizes the heroic figures of music. Knights of the musical revolution joust for innovative primacy: Schoenberg versus Stravinsky, Boulez versus Cage.

What was the real impetus driving 20th-century musical creation? How should one really define the critical and creative forces embodied in the vanguard of the past century’s musical revolution? Was it simply a matter of stylistic nitpicking and competition within an ill-defined zone of radicalism? Quite the contrary, we can only begin to perceive the contribution of the 20th century from the perspective of the big, inclusive theme that ended up, so to speak, on Ross’s cutting-room floor: that is, from a recognition of the fundamental right of everyone to create history and culture. Can it be that this notion is so very difficult? But I’ve noticed that Nicholas Cook pursued this very line of analysis in his recent book on the 20th century for the Cambridge University Press.

A narrow perspective on the 20th century is hardly peculiar to our author. The musicological literature provides many other examples. However, in this case, and in light of the book’s publication in Brazil, one simply cannot pass over certain issues in silence. One must expose these problems and proceed to lament the fact that the Brazilian publishers have tacitly played the dupe. They’ve chosen to accept the hype surrounding the book’s thesis rather than see its almost explicit assertion that Brazilian culture was irrelevant to 20th-century music. I have a suggestion, perhaps a little naïve: it would have sufficed to have changed the book’s subtitle to “Listening to a part of the 20th century.”

What one can appreciate about the book is its success in constructing a landscape rich in contextual detail around a half-hundred works representative of the century. The book represents the fruits of laborious documentary research. Arranging all of this material was indeed a considerable editorial undertaking, and in this respect the book constitutes a distinct achievement.

The narrative trajectory proceeds to connect the lives of the composers with the major political and artistic movements of their time. The author enriches the whole with an embroidery of detail and short descriptions of individual works—-more in the style of a journalistic critic than of an exponent of the “new musicology.” The descriptive language and the embellishing details constitute an indispensible part of the author’s strategy of binding the reader to his text and theme. But what is one to say about such cunning? In some cases the problems are quite evident. Concerning the last of the Three Pieces for Piano, Op. 11, of Schoenberg, Ross writes:

The keyboard turns into something like a percussion instrument, a battlefield of triple and quadruple forte.

For anyone familiar with the complex nature of these pieces, for anyone who knows something of their sophisticated workmanship and meticulously plotted structure—the subject of dozens of articles by writers such as Forte, Wittlich, and Perle, who themselves barely managed to skim the surface of what’s really going on in the music—Ross’s commentary rings hollow. It’s beside the point.

Now consider what Ross writes about Schoenberg’s Premonitions, the first of the Five Pieces for Orchestra:

[…] agitated rapid figures joined to trills, hypnotically circling whole-tone figures, woodwinds screeching in their uppermost registers, two-note patterns dripping like blood on marble, a spitting, snarling quintet of flutter-tongued trombones and tuba.

“Blood dripping on marble?” “Spitting and snarling trombones?” This is strange musicology! These vivid images are there to feed the imagination of the lay listener—-and nothing more. The connection to musical processes is tenuous. The same thing happens when Ross describes the Fifth Symphony of Mahler as:

[…] an interior drama devoid of any programmatic indication, moving through heroic struggle, a delirious funeral march, a wild, sprawling Scherzo, and a dreamily lyrical Adagietto to a radiant, chorale-driven finale.

Again, this is an essentially superficial description of a vastly complex work. If such reductionism is Ross’s promised achievement, if this is the price we have to pay for confronting the musical project of the 20th century, well, then, was it really worth the trouble?

Notes

¹ The Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty (Flip) is a prestigious annual literary conference in Brazil.

² The Week of ‘22, also known at the Week of Modern Art, was a festival held in São Paulo from the 11th to the 18th of February, 1922. It marked a national turn toward the most progessive ideas in music, painting, and literature. The participants included many of the most prominent modernist musicians, writers, and painters in Brazil, including Villa-Lobos, Mário de Andrade, and Anita Malfatti.