From Mahler to Dylan, ‘The Rest’ is Music

Would that all of us English concentrators could put our degrees to the use that Alex Ross ’90 has. His new book “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century” gives a revolutionary clarity to the history of classical music in America, and shows the world that a senior thesis on James Joyce can indeed pay real-world dividends.

A wise teaching fellow once told me that the goal of analyzing literature is to do the opposite of the work itself: if the book is simple, use your argument to complicate it, and if the book is complex, write about it in the simplest terms possible. Like Joyce, modern classical music, with its clashing harmonies and deliberately inscrutable structure, has become a locus for dissent between intellectual elites and the hoi polloi. You either get it or you don’t, the conventional wisdom says, and neither side of the divide wants much to do with the other.

Except for Alex Ross, that is. His book manages not just to reach across the vast chasm between classical and popular music, but also to make the distance seem shorter, the depth of the chasm shallower, and the passage across easier. He told a reporter for The New York Observer last month that “the whole point [is] to not be too in-your-face or condescending”—to present your argument simply, without over-simplifying.

Ross manages the spectacular feat of making this crazy music seem logical by taking a modular approach. Rather than trying to pack every opera, symphony, and concert into one narrative, he subdivides relentlessly and then assembles and reassembles the pieces to suit his arguments. (For music theorists, the technique is similar to twelve-tone composition.) Thus, he tracks simultaneous developments like Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal school in Austria and the early jazz compositions of little known American composers like Charles Ives and Will Marion Cook.

The book is broken into three parts by time period, and the parts broken into chapters by, apparently, whatever Ross felt like. His command of the material is so complete, and his guidance through it so gentle, that although some of the groupings he proposes seem opaque (“Dance of the Earth: The Rite, the Folk, le Jazz;” “Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties”), with a little reading and a little faith the connections soon become clear.

The effortless brilliance of his modular style is that, after building up one school of thought, he can quickly dismantle it and show which pieces became part of adjacent schools of thought, which changed shape and became different schools of thought, and which were never used again. Suddenly, sentences like, “[Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra] are fully symphonic in conception, Schoenbergian in content but Mahlerian in form” make total sense, as Berg, Schoenberg, and Mahler are all three simply components of Ross’s master architectural scheme, to be manipulated at will.

Not surprisingly, to the extent that there is a fundamental narrative, it is the story of high art, low art, and where they separated. The blessing and the curse of Ross’s writing style is that he loads his answer with as much nuance as the subject itself. He writes, “Music history is too often treated as...a flat image representing a landscape that is in reality borderless and continuous.” Classical European composers outpaced their audiences while Americans began exporting their music for the people; extremist political leaders used threats and violence to chain musicians to their propaganda machines; in-fighting and trend-chasing doomed classical music’s withering popularity—it was no single force but an historical perfect storm that drove the public away.

No one could be sadder about the separation than Ross, whose enthusiasm for music as music suffuses the book. His obvious affection for all those composers that posterity forgot leads him occasionally to bite off a larger chunk than his readership can chew (the “Invisible Men” chapter in particular feels overstuffed), but for the most part he makes now-peripheral figures like Franz Lehár and Roy Harris feel as relevant as Dmitri Shostakovich and Aaron Copland—or even Bob Dylan and Bo Diddley.

According to the Observer, Ross didn’t hear his first Dylan record until he reached his 20s, so there may yet be hope for Joyce-loving English concentrators with quaintly archaic tastes in music to make some sort of a living out of their skills. It will take a populist’s appreciation for the common man, an intellectual’s pure curiosity, a sentimentalist’s attachment to useless artifacts, and an epic poet’s literary stamina, but Ross has both paved the way and set the standard. The rest is up to you.

—Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.