Listening

For some weeks now I have been very tempted to go out and buy The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross. I was partly deterred by the fact that it is not yet out in paperback and that I would therefor have to pay thirty dollars for it. I kept telling myself that if I were just to pay off my Multnomah County Library fines I could borrow it for nothing. Then I would remember that my fines are somewhat more than thirty bucks and furthermore that having my very own copy would mean that I could keep it by my bed and dip into it at leisure without having to worry about its being overdue (and incurring further fines) and that I could make little marks in the margin should I wish to do so. These factors when combined were pretty persuasive but the clincher was when as a Border's 'preferred customer' I was emailed a 40% off coupon which meant that all I had to do was jump on the MAX and shell out eighteen dollars and instant biblio-gratification could be mine. Done! And let me tell you I am thrilled and that it would have been worth every cent of thirty dollars.

Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker and taken with Antony Lane who is the movie critic forms the core of my outsourced decision-making process. If Ross says "Listen to this..." I tend to listen and if Lane tells me that a movie is a must-see that's good enough to have me lining up in the rain and paying exorbitant rates for tickets and popcorn. But this book is far more than a series of critiques. The subtitle is 'Listening to the Twentieth Century' and that is a succinct and accurate description of its contents. Of course even in a book of nearly six hundred pages he couldn't hope to do justice to every composer or musical movement and influence of the last hundred years but I am now about 300 pages into it and have not found myself saying "Yes, but what about.....?"

I began by dipping in and out of the book just to get a feel for it and than, satisfied that it was going to be both fun and informative, went back to the beginning and set off on a grand musical adventure. His opening chapter, The Golden Age, tells of Richard Strauss conducting the first performance of his opera Salome to take place in Austria. This was in May 1906. The actual premier had taken place in Germany some five months earlier but the Austrian opening was to be an important occasion. Just how important may be judged from the list of luminaries in attendance: they included Puccini, Gustav Mahler with the lovely Alma, Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil Alban Berg who with the invention of the twelve-tone row and atonal music would do for the aural world what Picasso would do for the visual when he decided to stick both of a woman's eyes on the same side of her face. The widow of Johann Strauss II, composer of the Blue Danube was in attendance and, as Ross nicely puts it, "represented old Vienna". Some opening, huh? Oh, and Adolf Hitler was probably there too. In these opening pages, Ross captures marvellously not only the charged atmosphere of that night in Graz when Austria was introduced to one of the great femmes fatale of the world of opera but the entire fin-de-siecle spirit which pervaded the musical world then.

After dealing at some length with Strauss and Mahler Ross comes to Schoenberg. "Nothing in the annals of musical scandal - from the first night of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring to the release of the Sex Pistols "Anarchy in the UK" - rivals the ruckus that greeted Schoenberg early in his career". When you read a sentence like that how can you not think to yourself something along the lines of "Oh, really? This should be fun!" and wish to sink just a tad more deeply into your favourite chair while negotiating the turning of pages without putting to one side your glass of Dow's 12 year old.

And so it goes. My skipping ahead revealed excellent analyses of the operas of Beg, Gershwin and particularly Britten. The music of the 20th Century embraced much more than opera of course and Ross is equally at home in discussing symphonic and chamber works - not to mention the Beatles, Stockhausen and the Velvet Underground. I am looking forward to having this volume as my constant bedtime companion for the next week or two. This book is a tour de force of both scholarly musical research and engaging prose. I cannot recommend it too highly. Even without the 40% off.