The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by Alex Ross
Fourth Estate £20, pp624
For Hamlet, that incorrigible talker, the rest is silence. When he says this, he means that he is ready to die and his last words fade into unheard music as flights of angels sing him a lullaby. Death is quiet, which is why the loquacious Hamlet fears it. But life is noisy and the title of Alex Ross's musical history, rewriting Hamlet's expiring sigh, welcomes cacophony.
The last century was probably the most murderous instalment of human history so far; it was also the loudest, brutally percussive and mechanically brazen. Listening to the decades as they stomp by, Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, anthologises the uproar. Modernity in music begins, he believes, with the premiere of Strauss's Salome in 1905; the opera concludes with howling horns, shrieking woodwinds and thumping timpani as Herod's soldiers batter the nymphet beneath their shields in 'eight bars of noise'. Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo calls for a 'music of noise, free to roar, screech, bang and groan - an untempered, intemperate outcry'.
A trombone glissando at the end of Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole makes 'a gloriously rude noise', like the body impolitely expelling wind. Hammerblows concuss Mahler's sixth symphony. Even the abrupt silences of Webern, as Ross beautifully puts it, 'smack the ears like thunder', while the 'monstrous chord' that mimes Jack the Ripper's slaughter of the heroine in Berg's Lulu 'falls with terrible swiftness, stabbing at our ears'. We have drums of our own, deep in those aural cavities; music like this seems determined to perforate them.
Reading Ross's obstreperous chronicle can leave you with a headache. Two unsynchronised marching bands playing different tunes at different tempi rampage through a New England village in a piece by Charles Ives. Honking car horns blare in the urban soundscape of Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin. Edgard Varèse's Amériques augments the orchestra with a siren borrowed from the New York fire brigade.
Magnus Lindberg in Kraft uses scrap metal as percussion and gives the conductor a whistle to blow, like a harassed referee on the football field, while John Cage deploys hubcaps and spring coils from junked cars as musical instruments and David Tudor belabours the keyboard of the piano with boxing gloves. More balefully, Shostakovich, in his 13th symphony, orchestrates the fatal, discordant knock on the door that he, as a seditious artist terrorised by a totalitarian regime, waited for every anxious night of his life.
At times, the noise is produced by an infuriated audience. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring provokes a riot in 1913, and when Steve Reich's Four Organs is performed in New York in 1973, an elderly woman strides to the front of the hall, removes her shoe and bludgeons the lip of the stage with it, demanding that the ruckus stop.
Despite the hectic hilarity of such incidents, Ross has a serious and distressing tale to tell. A myth underlies his history: Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, about a Schoenbergian composer whose liberation of dissonance sabotages cosmic order, recurs throughout like a Wagnerian motif. Mann's hero Leverkühn formalises his compact with the Devil by writing a symphony entitled Apocalypse, in which unholy noise protests against the fiction of heavenly harmony.
Ross, taking over a pejorative phrase used by Olivier Messiaen, sees the great works of European musical modernism as 'black masterpieces'; the noise-makers know that, in God's absence, every kind of sonic outrage is possible. The reawakening earth consumes a human victim in Stravinsky's Rite ... and Berg sends a serial killer to cleanse the polluted world in Lulu. The diabolical project retains its attraction in the Seventies, when Faust, in Alfred Schnittke's unfinished opera, 'goes down to hell to the accompaniment of a satanic tango'.
But Europe's self-destruction is halted just in time by America. The composer Harry Partch decries the crazed ambition and neurotic frenzy of 'the Faustian strain' and calls instead for a music that can soothe the body and ease the soul. European culture haughtily divides the avant-garde - composers who abstractly treat music as a branch of mathematics, like Schoenberg with his dodecaphonic rows - from the asinine, pop-guzzling mass; America heals the breach. The new country has a levelling influence on the deified artists who arrive on tour: Strauss gives a concert in a New York department store, Mahler rides on the subway. It all sounds uncomfortably similar to Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history', with the dialectical opposition between left and right resolved in the triumph of liberal democracy and the market economy.
Commenting on Stravinsky's negotiations with Walt Disney and Barnum & Bailey's Circus, Ross hails the United States as 'a marketplace in which absolutely anything can be bought and sold'. At times, his grand narrative paraphrases the messianic imperialism preached by George W Bush. As Ross sees it, Messiaen brings God back to earth during a tour of America's national parks, whose geological radiance he transcribes in From the Canyons to the Stars; Bartok, having migrated from Budapest to Manhattan, plans his Concerto for Orchestra as a 'parting gift to his adopted country - a portrait of democracy in action'. It's a shame that rich America disregarded the offering and left Bartok to die in misery.
I'm happy to pardon Ross's patriotism, given his rare talent for translating sounds into words. His metaphors leap across the abyss between the two arts. He calls the sweltering prelude to Schoenberg's Gurrelieder a 'steambath', likens Janacek's rhythms to a jerky needle on a gramophone, and, in another tribute to the open spaces of America, says that the music of John Adams sounds like Highway 1, the coastal road that travels the length of California.
Print is silent, which is why the task of writing about music is so difficult. I should therefore probably explain that the noise you now ought to be hearing is the sound of my hands as they stop typing and start applauding this vital, engaging, happily polyphonic book.
· The movie described in The Rest is Noise can be heard at www.therestisnoise.com
