The Rest is Noise

I recently began reading Alex Ross' inaugural book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which shares its name with his fabulous blog. As a critic for The New Yorker, Ross captured my attention (and many others') years ago when it became clear that he promotes a holistic approach to music, rather than a genre-based elitism. In other words, he likes things because they're excellent, not because they're "classical". He blogs about everything from American Idol to esoteric jazz groups like The Bad Plus to outrageous productions of standard opera repertoire and anything else that runs along the continuum of music's natural historical progression. In 2004, he wrote a defining piece that encapsulates the way I too feel about "classical music" and its bedragled place in the musical constellation.

The book offers an overview of musical development throughout the 20th Century, starting with Mahler and Strauss and focusing how the composers worked within their larger historical contexts. I just finished an amazing chapter in which Ross disects the introduction of African-American tunes and musicians into the fabric of standard, Eurocentric music and his conclusions are remarkable: the rise of spirituals as the foundation for 20th century music was predicted as early as Dvorak in the 1890s, but racist American culture in the 1920s and 1930s prevented talented black musicians from joining the traditional performance circuits and forced them to find a voice within their own underground venues. The chapter led me to wonder what would music be like today if this split hadn't happened? Can we even imagine European music moving along the same trajectory it had for hundreds of years, absorbing and celebrating black influence instead of spitting it out and spawning the birth of jazz and everything else that's followed? Ross suggests we started to see this in Jerome Kern and Gershwin, but "classical music" was already too narrowly defined to let their ideas revive the integrated "high-low art of Mozart and Verdi".