classical music Archives

Hallelujah Junction

May 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

John Adams’ personal biography and musical Odyssey

John Adams is probably the best-known American composer of classical music alive today. His operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer have played to audiences all over the world, and his orchestral sketch Short Ride in a Fast Machine is such a favourite concert opener that you hear it on the radio almost every day in some setting or other. A post-war baby of musical parents, he was raised on the east coast in New England, and after a childhood as a clarinetist of some distinction he moved to study at Harvard. There he seemed destined for a life as an academic composer. But two things seemed to have worked against this: an adventurous, rebellious spirit, and a love of popular American culture, which as he matured in the 1960s included imported English pop music, dance bands (in which his father played) and television. All of these cultural influences have been reflected in his later work.

Rejecting the conventional route to success, he took another which led him to the west coast, where after a bout of proletarian enthusiasm he gave up the 48 hour week of a warehouse worker to take up a teaching post at the Conservatory of Music in San Francisco. There he threw himself into the cultural experimentalism which was then in vogue. This included the upsurge of jazz and blues music, and the American literary cult of Jack Kerouac, the Beat poets, William Burroughs, and of course drugs of all kinds.

He stuck with the experimental music and the dafter tendencies of modernism for quite some time. I was quite surprised how respectful he is to John Cage, who always strikes me as completely bogus. But he’s very generous in his appreciation of his fellow composers and contemporaries. Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Ingram Marshall are all given warm encomiums. There are also, en passant positive sketches of artists such as Dawn Upshaw, Kent Ngano, Peter Sellers, and Conlan Nancarrow.

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, a work as perfect in its own genre as any that Mozart composed in his, was the product of a supremely confident twenty-four year old who got everything right in one stroke. Its signature motif, the ‘blue note’ flattened seventh, is a rendering on the piano of the keening style of singing from the Negro South. Gershwin threads that motto into a harmonic web of delicious stepwise modulations that take every advantage of the discoveries from fifty or even sixty years earlier. But here, the mood is New World, high energy, with a jubilant lyricism that gives the impression of an irresistible spontaneity. In the hands of Gershwin, the ambiguity and restlessness of those potent Romantic chords is reborn to a new life, not morbidly self-aware and shaded toward the dark end of the emotional spectrum, but full of fresh optimism, busy and brash and thoroughly at ease with itself.

But gradually he began to find his own voice and the techniques which would help him to articulate it. This development was assisted by his moment-of-truth decision to leave atonality behind and embrace tonal harmony as the rockbed for musical expression. It was also accompanied by his determination to stick by his enthusiasm for electronic musical instruments.

Anyone interested in the development of synthesisers, modulators, and multi-track recorders, right up to the computer-programmed methods of sound generation which are now possible will be delighted by the enthusiastic joy in all these gadgets and gizmos that he expresses. At times it’s like reading Popular Mechanics.

He’s also quite prepared to share the downsides of a composer’s life: productions which are badly mauled by critics and audience alike; fallow periods and creative blocks; the political controversies in which he becomes involved because of the contemporary nature of his subject matter.

The central portions of the book describe the genesis and execution of his large scale works – the Harmonielehre, Nixon in China, and The Death of Klinghoffer, yet strangely enough, when it comes to accounts of his more recent works he goes into great detail concerning the religious ideas in El Nino and the scientific and political history behind Doctor Atomic but he says very little about the musical ideas in either opera.

He’s a widely read and cultivated man with a social conscience, and he’s prepared to discuss culture and ideas at a serious level. Just occasionally he skirts dangerously close to a note of self-importance, but this is offset by his willingness to discuss his obvious artistic failures, such as the premiere of The Dharma at Big Sur and his song cycle, the clumsily titled I was Looking at the Ceiling, and Then I Saw the Sky.

Although it’s a personal record, this is an important book on contemporary American classical music – which sits as a useful companion piece to Alex Ross’s recent The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. John Adams’ official web site is at www.earbox.com

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, London: Faber, 2008, pp.340, ISBN: 0571231152

More on music
More on media
More on lifestyle

Igor Stravinsky: 1882-1934

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

part one of the definitive biography

This is the currently definitive biography of Igor Stravinsky – master of European modernism whom many consider to be the greatest composer of the twentieth century. It’s a consummate and magisterial piece of work – superbly referenced and annotated; and just about every claim made within it is backed up with evidence. The notes to the text itself run to 113 pages.

Stephen Walsh begins by clearing the ground between himself and Robert Craft – the man who made himself Stravinsky’s amanuensis, secretary, helpmate, and collaborator towards the end of his life. Craft wanted to control the Stravinsky estate (including the money) as well as his critical reputation, but Walsh is having none of that. He insists on factual accuracy, backed up with hard evidence.

Yet even though it’s quite clear that he knows everything there is to know about the details of Stravinsky’s life, and can justify every claim with a fully referenced source, he has problems constructing a logical and readable narrative of the composer’s life. For instance Stravinsky’s brother Roman dies three times within as many short chapters at the start of the book, and Stravinsky is abruptly announced to be twenty years old and has completed his first piece of music on page fifty. Most of the previous forty-nine have been devoted to describing the Russian countryside.

Walsh is exceptionally good at recreating the social and historical context in which Stravinsky was raised – from the lack of sanitation in late nineteenth-century Petersburg to the fact that the composer didn’t even go to school until he was nearly eleven.

The story of Stravinsky’s life is already fairly well known, so what does Walsh offer that’s new? Well, quite apart from his claim to accuracy in interpreting textual evidence, it’s quite clear that he is an authority on Russian cultural history. Every time a friend, relative, or acquaintance enters the story, his narrative swells out for pages on end with their biographical details – to the extent that (especially in the earlier part of the book) Stravinsky himself becomes a indistinct figure, hovering indistinctly like some half-forgotten ghost.

This is a feature of Walsh’s approach which you would expect to diminish as Stravinsky becomes more successful – largely because he is endlessly on the move from one city and country to another – Petersburg, Brittany, Switzerland, Paris, Cote d’Azur. This is the material of a biographer’s dream. But Walsh is more interested in scouring correspondence to apportion exact responsibility for the plot development of the early masterpieces (Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring) The composer’s dramatic private life is left relatively unexamined – despite his meeting with such luminaries as Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Schoenberg, and Manuel de Falla.

And this avoidance of the personal has some serious repercussions. When Diaghilev throws an enormous tantrum on hearing of Nijinsky’s marriage, Walsh still can’t bring himself to mention the fact that they had been lovers. Diaghilev shunned The Rite of Spring because of its close connection with his ex-favourite – and this immediately affected Stravinsky’s ability to earn a living from its success – for a personal, not a musical reason.

But we do gain benefits from his thoroughness, as well as having to endure its longeurs. On Stravinsky’s first visit to Spain, an affair with the ballerina Lydia Lopukhova is followed up biographically to record that she later married Diaghilev’s financial manager, and then later after eloping from London with a Russian general, she eventually married John Maynard Keynes.

Another thing which emerges instructively from all the background commentary on Stravinsky’s work (and that of his collaborators) is what utter rubbish many of the so-called critics wrote about the music. Jacques Riviere on the Rite of Spring for instance:

The Rite of Spring … has no juice to dull its brilliance, no cookery to rearrange or spoil its contours. It is not a “work of art”, with all the usual palaver. Nothing blurred, nothing reduced by shadows; no veils or poetic softenings; no trace of atmosphere. The work is whole and untreated…

As he becomes more successful, the 1920s are passed in the swirl of a quasi-bohemian, quasi-aristocratic milieu. Oedipus Rex was a collaboration with opium-addicted Jean Cocteau, whose detoxification cures were paid for by Coco Chanel, with whom Stravinsky had a brief affair.

But the dominant figure in this first volume is certainly Diaghilev, with whom Stravinsky collaborated on almost all his early major works. The two men had their differences, especially over money; but they respected each other as artists, and seemed to bring out the best in each other.

The other problematic leitmotif in Stravinsky’s life is that of copyright, which had not been internationally agreed at the time of his early works. There were also very complex arrangements whereby some people ‘owned’ works because they had paid a commissioning fee, and others held the rights to performances for a limited period. This resulted in erratic income for the composer – though a man who could buy a large chauffer-driven automobile in the 1920s was not in financial difficulties.

Stravinsky also had the expense of keeping two ‘families’. For his life was divided permanently between his lover Vera Sudeykina, with whom he lived in Paris and took on concert tours, and Katya, his wife and the mother of his four children, whom he left at home and visited when required.

It’s interesting to note how fond Stravinsky was of any technical developments which would assist him in both making a record of his own work and exploring the possibilities of new sounds. He made piano rolls, bought a player-piano, learnt to play the cimbalom, and eagerly recorded his work on both mechanical and electrical equipment.

Serious musicologists will be glad to learn that Walsh puts a lot of effort into tracing the developments in Stravinsky’s musical style. This goes (in this volume) from the expressive force of the Rite to the neo-classicism of Apollo. This is done in an all-round manner by looking at the original ‘idea’ (often the result of a commission) then the musical material from which he took his inspiration, through to the actual conditions (and possible limitations) which surrounded the first performance.

Despite some of the negative effects of Walsh’s writing, I found this a fascinating account of the artist and a well-informed glimpse into a rich period of cultural history. Volume one ends in 1934 with the Nazis in the ascendant and Stravinsky sharing musical chit-chat with Mussolini, for who he had a high regard. In this climactic year Stravinsky took out French citizenship and moved his entire extended family into a fifteen-room apartment near the Place de la Concorde – in the arrondissement next to his lover Vera. Stravinsky’s main worry about this proximity was that his eighty-year-old mother should not find out about his not-so-secret other life.

See part two of this biography

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky – A Creative Spring: Russia and France 1882-1934, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp.696, ISBN: 1845952219

More on music
More on media
More on lifestyle

Igor Stravinsky: 1934-1971

September 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

second volume of the definitive biography

The first volume of this masterly biography ends in 1934 with the death of Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky’s composition of Persephone, his adoption of French citizenship, and his no less important decision to move his extended family from the south of France to take up residence in Paris – in the next arrondissement to his lover, Vera Sudeykima.

To give some idea of the complexities of these arrangements, Stravinsky not only made it known to his wife that he paid Sudeykima an allowance, but as if this was not enough he heaped onto it the additional humiliation that in his absence she should hand over the money to her in person – which she did.

The second volume opens with the darkening years of the mid-1930s, and Stravinsky remaining as politically naive as ever in the face of rising fascism and anti-Semitism. The only thing which seemed to disturb him was a general assumption that he was Jewish – which was not the case. He continued to give his moral if not practical support to Mussolini and Franco, and he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1938 with the somewhat disingenuous excuse that he needed the money to pay his daughter’s medical bills.

As the 1930s progressed Stravinsky’s personal life seems to have become worse and worse. There were problems with his four children, all of whom had difficulties creating independent destinies for themselves, permanently overshadowed as they were by the fame and the rather dictatorial manner of their father. His wife Katya became ill and was confined to an Alpine sanatorium, run along similar lines to the Berghof in Thomas Mann‘s The Magic Mountain. Her daughter accompanied her on the journey, and was also kept there as a patient.

Then in 1938 fate struck a double blow. First Stravinsky’s daughter died, then his wife. Yet so many people rallied to help him that within a short time he had secured a teaching post at Harvard, married Sudeykima, and he ended up living in California – like Arnold Schoenberg ‘expelled into Paradise’.

This was a period in which he tried without much success to find work composing for the film industry. He knew all the right people, and Hollywood was happy to adapt his earlier works, but none of the big projects mooted came to fruition. Instead, he produced such miniatures as the Circus Polka for dancing elephants and the Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman’s band. However, he came back in full force with the composition in 1946 of the Symphony in Three Movements.

Interestingly enough the copyright issue crops up yet again (just as it did in the first volume) – but with a new twist. Stravinsky and his advisors hit upon the ruse of his revising earlier pieces of work. If they could be made sufficiently distinct from the originals, they could be re-copyrighted. Moreover, if Stravinsky took out US citizenship (which he promptly did) he would have full protection and ownership of the new versions – which could be translated into hard cash.

The war in Europe had one good effect on Stravinsky: it caused him to re-think his reactionary political views – rather as it did for his fellow-exile Thomas Mann. He became a Trueman-supporting democrat.

If Diaghilev was the presiding secondary figure in Volume One, the equivalent figure in Two is Robert Craft. He was a young American student of composition and conducting who managed to inveigle himself into the Stravinskys’ affections to such an extent that he became a combination of amanuensis, secretary, manager, advisor, and even domestic help. He also had close access to Stravinsky’s manuscripts – which was to cause a lot of trouble later.

Musically, the centrepiece of this second volume is the composition of The Rake’s Progress which took three and a half years. He worked with Auden and Chester Kallman as librettists. This was followed by Agon and the premiere of Canticum sacrum in St Mark’s, Venice. From this point on, his compositions became increasingly influenced by a Schoenbergian twelve-tone scale form of writing, even though he had kept himself at a very long arm’s length during his rival’s own lifetime.

Since Stravinsky’s personal life had settled into an almost conventional marriage with Vera, Walsh’s account now begins to focus on a concert-by-concert account of his professional life: (Stravinsky maintained that he earned his living as a conductor). Walsh records every possible detail of the choice of programme, the fee paid, the musical rehearsals, and the roles played by agents, go-betweens, and performers.

The latter part of the book traces Stravinsky’s last (and serial) compositions, but it is really a detailed examination of just how much Robert Craft controlled, contributed to, or even created works which were published under Stravinsky’s name. He also began writing letters and memoirs which were attributed to the man who was in a roundabout way his employer.

As Stravinsky declines into ill-health approaching death, the story becomes an almost nineteenth-century inheritance drama of tax lawyers, relatives, Craft, and various hangers-on vying for control of Stravinsky’s assets and archive with a view to lining their own pockets. And when he did eventually expire the conflict between warring parties became pure Jarndyce Vs Jarndyce, with the widow Vera eventually paying out $200,000 to retain control – and even that was only an interim measure. The dispute continued even after her death; the relatives died off in their turn; and even the eventual purchaser of the archive, Paul Sacher, was duped out of almost two million dollars by the lawyers.

Fortunately for us, the music lives on.

See part one of this biography

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky – The Second Exile: France and America 1934-1971, London: Pimlico, 2007, pp.709, ISBN: 0712697950

More on music
More on media
More on lifestyle

Listen to This

December 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essays on classical and contemporary music

Listen to This is the follow up to Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century which was a huge success when it was published last year. His new book is a collection of essays which first appeared in The New Yorker where he is resident music critic. Some readers will be amazed at the wide variety of music he covers. In one sense (to use the language of record producers) he’s monetising his back catalogue, because some of the essays date from as long as nearly twenty years ago.

In the magazine and on his blog at The Rest Is Noise he makes a vigorous effort to document, expand, and proselytise on behalf of contemporary music. And I use the term ‘contemporary’ for two reasons. The first is that although much of his writing is concerned with the traditions of church, concert hall, and chamber music stretching from the early renaissance to the present day, he rejects the term ‘classical’ as inaccurate and restricting. It does not include what we now call ‘early music’ and it excludes music being written and performed by living composers. The second reason is that it also excludes music from other genres, such as jazz, experimental modernism, and rock – some of which attract far more listeners than any ‘classical’ music has ever done.

This collection seeks to redress this narrowness and imbalance by including essays on pop and contemporary art music, alongside pieces on Brahms, Schubert, and Mozart. Not that he is entirely at ease in embracing these apparently contradictory enthusiasms. In his opening essay he wrestles with this seemingly conflicting taste for classical and pop music, and it’s significant that whilst his love of traditional music is rooted in composers such as Beethoven, Mahler, and Wagner, but he can look beyond these to modern symphonic music, his taste in popular genres is far less mature and well-informed. He’s attracted to superficial pop stars, white American rock music, and even talentless wannabes such as Bjork.

He also touches in his introductory essays on a far more interesting and fundamental issue. How is it possible, he asks, to write critically and analytically about music, when it is an abstract form of expression? Because music, despite all its power to move us emotionally, doesn’t actually mean anything. How can this be true, when so many people find such a great deal of satisfaction in listening to it? This is a paradox to which he never really finds a solution.

Ross is an incredibly fluent and entertaining writer, and he can go on for several hundred words describing his reaction to Beethoven’s Eroica. But ultimately, his account of this experience comes down to what he rightly calls the ‘purple’ school of music criticism – ‘Beethoven’s Fifth symphony begins with fate knocking at the door’.

There’s an essay on Mozart in which he examines the composer’s greatness in the process of reviewing a Philips’ issue of the complete works on 180 CDs. This gives him the opportunity to spot evidence of links between dramatic situations and musical motifs in pieces written many years apart – which he offers as evidence for the notion that Mozart had these constructions wired into his inventive DNA.

He is drawn towards biographical interpretation, but has to admit that there is precious little evidence to support it. The fact is that artists can create tragic art works during happy periods of their life – and optimistic upbeat works when they’re in the middle of personal tragedies.

An essay on the pop group Radiohead is not much more than a well-written character sketch of the band members, with some festival rock atmosphere thrown in. It’s the sort of thing which does not help his cause to enlarge the scope of what he calls ‘the music’ at all. The documentary-journalistic approach is much better employed when he gives an account of classical music in contemporary China.

The same is true of his essay on Bob Dylan. There’s plenty of biographical anecdote stressing his eccentric behaviour and amazing productivity, and in-depth consideration of ambiguity in his lyrics – but very little about the music itself. The most interesting detail to emerge from what is obviously a close acquaintance with his live concerts and recorded work is that Dylan constantly reshapes his own material – adding new lyrics to songs, changing their harmonic structures, and even recycling old lyrics with new melodies. Jazz musicians do this all the time, but it is unusual in both pop and ‘classical’ music, and it strikes me as being a topic worthy of further examination.

He has what can only be called a weakness for experimentalism. [I was surprised at his taking John Cage seriously in The Rest is Noise.] Here he creates a touching portrait of John Luther Adams, giving a sympathetic account of compositions for ninety voices that last for six hours, and continuous music that is ‘composed’ by seismic readings and temperature measurements from local meteorological stations. This is music you can ‘live in’, music that never ends – which begs the question of whether it is music at all.

Naturally he is in favour of bolstering more public support for musical education and participation in the arts, but he doesn’t seem to understand that culture in any society is produced with what’s left over after the basic requirements for survival have been met. A nation with half its population living on food stamps and state benefits hasn’t got the resources to spare for violin lessons for underprivileged children – whose parents don’t have the money or the inclination to attend concerts of classical music. In other words, his heart is in the right place, but he doesn’t seem to have thought through the relationship between art and economics. Only societies with large budget surpluses can afford to subsidise nineteenth century sized orchestras.

The best essay in the collection is his most recent – a virtuoso survey of the descending base line which appears throughout western musical history in forms from the chaconne to the twelve bar blues. This manages to combine the technical analysis of music with the ‘purple’ approach to criticism, arguing that there is something fundamental in this progression which illustrates a ‘meaning’ in this seemingly most abstract of art forms. After all, it is no accident that most ‘sad’ music is written in minor keys.

He’s amazingly well informed about the world of music as a profession, and sandwiched within these essays there are some fascinating insights which could easily be expanded into articles in their own right – the history of applause at concerts for instance, or the fact that the average member of the Berlin Philharmonic is a generation younger than the Rolling Stones.

Although it lacks the continuous narrative and the intellectual rigour of The Rest is Noise this is a fascinating collection of studies that brings an infectious enthusiasm to the appreciation of music. He doesn’t solve either of his two main problems, but his exploration of the issues is inspiring and certainly promotes the urge to listen more.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Alex Ross, Listen to This, London: Fourth Estate, 2010, pp.400, ISBN: 0007319061

More on music
More on media
More on lifestyle

The Rest is Noise

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

classical music in the twentieth century

Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker magazine who blogs prolifically at The Rest is Noise. And even though he doesn’t have comments switched on at his site, his postings are required reading for anyone who wants to keep abreast of classical music – especially as seen from New York city. His tastes and references are amazingly eclectic and unstuffy. One minute he’s analysing the latest staging of the Ring Cycle and next he’s reporting on developments in contemporary rock music or a recently discovered private recording of a John Coltrane radio broadcast.

This is his long-awaited first book and major oeuvre as a critic, tracing the development of twentieth century classical music from the first night of Strauss’s Salome (no accent) in 1905 to John Adams‘s Nixon in China in 1987. He has an amazingly developed sense of cultural history- reminding us whilst discussing the development of Thomas Mann‘s traditional musical ideas in relation to Schoneberg that Leon Trotsky spent the years 1907 to 1914 in exile in Vienna where these modernist moves were being played out, alongside the work of Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokoshka, and Egon Schiele. He darts back and forth in time in a way which is at first bewildering, but there’s a good reason for doing so – usually to show how far back cultural convergences began.

His narrative is spiced by what might be called the higher musical gossip. He slips in references and anecdotes which sparkle like gems on the page. Schoneberg’s bon mot on his exile in California: ‘I was driven into Paradise’, and Charlie Parker spontaneously quoting from The Firebird when he spotted Igor Stravinsky was in the audience at Birdland one night.

It’s an approach which relies heavily on anecdote and cultural montage – but his juxtapositions are all backed up by scholarly references which are kept wisely at the back of the book, They don’t encumber the narrative.

His descriptions of symphonies and major orchestral works are a mixture of technical analysis and an impressionistic account of what is going on:

In the last bars, the note B aches for six slow beats against the final C-major chord, like a hand outstretched from a figure disappearing into light.

Maybe the mixture is just about right. After all, it’s difficult to write about music, which is essentially abstract. When you think about it, music doesn’t mean anything, even though it can be incredibly moving and beautiful. Though that, of course, is meaning of a kind.

The Spirit of Schoenberg presides over the first part of the book: all other music seems to be measured against his purist ethos and practice. This phase ends with the premiere of Berg’s Lulu in 1937. My only disappointment in this section was his account of Duke Ellington, which concentrated on his not-to-be-performed opera Boola and failed to bring out the element of small-scale symphonies or concertos which characterised much of his sub three-minute compositions for 78 rpm recordings.

In the second part, Shostakovich is let off the hook somewhat. As a way of explaining his capitulation to Stalinism, Ross describes him as having ‘divided selves’ – though to do him credit, Ross doesn’t try to conceal the privileges he enjoyed (spacious Moscow flat with three pianos, for which he thanked Stalin personally) whilst his contemporaries were being led of to the Gulag or despatched with a bullet in the back of the head.

It’s interesting to read of the style wars of the 1940s and 1950s with the benefit of half a century’s hindsight. Major composers such as Stravinsky were being written off by people who are now forgotten – and it’s even more amazing to read that the champions of atonal music and the concerts arranged to promote them were funded by the CIA.

Ross clearly has his heroes – Strauss (despite his Nazi associations) Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. And even though he may not have intended it, Pierre Boulez emerges from the narrative as a distinctly pushy, unpleasant piece of self-aggrandisement.

I was surprised that he took John Cage so seriously – somebody who has always struck me as completely bogus – but he gives a touching account of Aaron Copland, who suffered harassment and criticism in his own country during the McCarthy trials for his leftish sympathies, despite his having written such iconic evocations of America as Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man

There’s a whole chapter on Benjamin Britten, where I was glad to see that Ross doesn’t shy away from the much-ignored fact that much of Britten’s work deals with the sexual and emotional violation of young boys. He even reveals that Britten (in a Michael Jackson moment) took the juvenile star of his 1954 The Turn of the Screw (David Hemmings) into his own bed. But Ross’s account of Britten is far from smutty. There’s a several page long account of Peter Grimes which is the most extended musical analysis in the whole book.

He ends his narrative with an account of the American minimalists – the music still apparently split into two camps, but this time ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’ – and he has a roundup of developments in Europe following the collapse of communism and the Berlin Wall. His story concludes with a part-wish, half-expectation that classical and popular music will somehow embrace each other in a way which will create new forms in the twenty-first century.

This is a very readable, indeed a compelling work which combines love of the subject with a detailed knowledge of its history and cultural context. It’s the sort of book that makes you feel like reading with a piano keyboard to hand in order to follow the formal sequences and chord progressions he describes. Unmissable for anyone interested in twentieth century music.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: listening to the twentieth century, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007, pp.624, ISBN: 0374249393

More on music
More on media
More on lifestyle

John Adams’ personal biography and musical Odyssey

part one of the definitive biography

second volume of the definitive biography

essays on classical and contemporary music

classical music in the twentieth century

Get in touch