The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Reed entered the picture in 1964. At the time he was writing kitsch songs for a company called Pickwick Records. For reasons that remain obscure, Pickwick hired three Eternal Music performers—Cale, Tony Conrad, and the drummer-sculptor Walter De Maria—to assist Reed in performing a would-be novelty hit called “The Ostrich.” It went nowhere, but the Eternal musicians got along with Reed, who was independently experimenting with novel tunings and modes. The first Reed-Cale band was called the Primitives. A little later, with Sterling Morrison on guitar and the Eternal Music percussionist Angus MacLise on drums, they became the Velvet Underground.

  At first the Velvets specialized in art happenings and underground-film screenings. Then they began putting on conventional rock shows. MacLise quit, objecting to any format that would force him to start and stop at a specific time. Maureen Tucker, a drummer with a hard minimal touch, replaced him. A 1965 New Year’s Eve show caught the ear of Andy Warhol, who plugged the band into a multimedia event called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. An album finally emerged in 1967, with some of the songs sung by the doomy-voiced German model Nico. The Velvet Underground & Nico sold poorly at first but is now recognized as one of the most beautifully daring rock records ever made.

  La Monte’s everlasting fifth (“To be held for a long time”) is all over The Velvet Underground & Nico. It hums in back of “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” stamps beneath the bluesy “I’m Waiting for the Man,” flickers in the stream of consciousness of “The Black Angel’s Death Song.” Other songs gravitate to blues, rock ’n’ roll, and Tin Pan Alley forms, but with a flat, unsentimental affect. Free dissonance periodically saturates the field, leaving the listener with the uneasy feeling that these often wistful songs survive at the whim of a cruel authority.

  In the seven-minute onslaught of “Heroin,” at the end of side A of the LP, a held note sets a deceptively calming tone. Maureen Tucker lays down a purring pattern of tom-tom and bass-drum beats. Cale’s viola kicks in with an open fifth. Reed’s lyrics evoke the eerie peacefulness of a junkie absorbed in the task of sending himself into oblivion. Later, the drone splinters apart into a storm of microtonal, electric-Xenakis noise, as Reed looks around with contemptuous sorrow at a world of “politicians making crazy sounds” and “dead bodies piled up in mounds.” Three months before the release of Sgt. Pepper’s, the Velvet Underground had closed the gap between rock and the avant-garde.

  After the Velvets came Brian Eno, an art-school experimentalist who metamorphosed into one of the unlikeliest pop stars of the modern era. Eno’s early musical loves were John Cage and La Monte Young; he liked to unnerve audiences by smashing out the endless repeated chords of Young’s X for Henry Flynt, which was also part of Cale’s repertory. When the Philip Glass Ensemble played Music with Changing Parts in London in 1971, Eno was in the crowd, enthralled. He also attended a Steve Reich and Musicians concert in 1974. Reich remembers a trendy-looking Englishman with long hair and lipstick greeting him after the show, although at that time he had no idea who Eno was.

  Eno acquired pop celebrity circa 1971, when he played keyboards and designed sound effects for the art-rock band Roxy Music, which shot to stardom on the strength of the song “Virginia Plain.” Reichian phasing effects appear on the second Roxy Music album, For Your Pleasure, marking another slippage of minimalism into pop. Eno broke away to become a solo artist, superstar record producer, record-label entrepreneur, sound theorist, and freelance composer. Under the influence of the minimalists, he propagated the genre of “ambient” music—music that floats at the edge of the listener’s consciousness, weightless and pristine.

  The chain of influences continued. Standing next to Eno at Glass’s 1971 performance in London was the rising rock star David Bowie. On his mid-seventies albums Station to Station, Low, and Heroes, Bowie abandoned A-B-A pop-song structure in favor of semi-minimalist forms characterized by dry attacks and rapid pulses. (Glass returned Bowie’s homage by writing a Low Symphony.) Terry Riley got a nod from the Who, who learned tricks from his solo electronic improvisations and worked his name into the title of their teenage-wasteland anthem “Baba O’Riley.” Swirling patterns out of Reich and Glass showed up in upbeat disco hits of the late seventies, then spread to the darker, druggier environs of techno, house, and rave music. The great New York post-punk band Sonic Youth has a distinguished minimalist ancestry; its two lead guitarists, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, first met while playing in an electric-guitar orchestra organized by the downtown composer Glenn Branca, a committed Reich and Glass fan.

  Even hip-hop, the dominant end-of-century pop form, isn’t immune to the minimalist virus. Lacking instruments of their own, rappers from America’s ruined inner cities built up tracks by playing fragments on turntables, placing themselves in a circuitous line of descent that goes back, by way of Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1, to Wolpe and Hindemith’s phonograph concerts in pre-Nazi Berlin. As technology grew more sophisticated, tracks became monstrously dense: Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” is the Rite of Spring of black America. Hip-hop relies on the speaking voice, but, as Janáček, Partch, and Reich demonstrated at different times, the speaking voice has music in it. On Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s antimaterialist anthem “Wake Up,” a preacher or politician is heard angrily shouting, “Wake up! Wake up!” Then an ultraminimal three-note melody is extracted from the pitch content of the voice. This is much like Reich’s Different Trains. Not since Wagner has a classical composer put so much of the outer world under his spell, whether or not the outer world knows it.

  “Repetition is a form of change,” Brian Eno once said, summing up the minimalist ethos. Repetition is inherent in the science of sound: tones move through space in periodic waves. It is also inherent in the way the mind processes the outside world. So, in a sense, minimalism is a return to nature. At the same time, repetition underpins all technological existence. Robert Fink, in a cultural study of the movement, acknowledges that minimalism often mimics the sped-up, numbed-out repetitions of consumer culture, the incessant iteration of commercial jingles on TV. But he argues that the minimalists deliver a kind of silent critique of the world as it is. They locate depths in surfaces, slowness in rapid motion. Borrowing a neologism from the musicologist Christopher Small, Fink writes: “Repetitive musicking rarely expresses a longing for authentic relationships that don’t exist, and in this way has at least the virtue of honesty that more traditionally avant-garde musicking often lacks. More often repetitive music provides an acknowledgment, a warning, a defense—or even just an aesthetic thrill—in the face of the myriad repetitive relationships that, in late-capitalist consumer society, we all must face over and over (and over and over…). We repeated ourselves into this culture. We might be able to repeat ourselves out.”

  15

  SUNKEN CATHEDRALS

  Music at Century’s End

  As Highway 1, the California coastal highway, goes north of San Francisco, it holds the eyes like a work of art. The landscape might have been devised by a trickster creator who delights in grand gestures and abrupt transitions. Rolling meadows end in cliffs; redwood trees rise above slender patches of beach. Towers of rock rest on the surface of the ocean like the ghosts of clipper ships. A lost cow sits on the shoulder, looking out to sea. Side roads head up the inland hills at odd angles, tempting the aimless driver to follow them to the end. One especially beguiling detour, the Meyers Grade Road, departs from Highway 1 shortly after the town of Jenner. The grade is 18 percent, and the steepness of the ascent causes dizzying distortions of perspective. The Pacific Ocean rises in the rearview mirror like a blue hill across a hidden valley.

  Not far from here is Brushy Ridge, the forest home of the composer John Adams. One way to describe his work is to say that it sounds like Highway 1. It is a cut-up paradise, a stream of familiar sounds arranged in unfamiliar ways. A glitzy Hollywood fanfare gives way to a trancelike sequence of shifting beats; billowing clouds of Wagnerian harmony are dispersed by a qua
rtet of saxophones. It is present-tense American romanticism, honoring the ghosts of Mahler and Sibelius, plugging into minimalist processes, swiping sounds from jazz and rock, browsing the files of postwar innovation. Sundry sounds are broken down and filtered through an instantly recognizable personal voice, sometimes exuberant and sometimes melancholy, sometimes hip and sometimes noble, winding its way through a fragmentary culture.

  Brushy Ridge is at the far end of the Meyers Grade Road, and the last part of the drive is a matter of guesswork. The Adams house, at the top of a rocky hill, is a comfortable, earthy, rural-hippie kind of place; not too long ago, it served as the headquarters for a pot farm. Walking in, you might find the composer asleep on the couch with the collected poems of Allen Ginsberg lying open in front of him. He has a youthful face, framed by a neat, silvery beard. His eyes are sometimes bright with curiosity, sometimes clouded with a slight sadness. There is an appealing innocence about him, but it is an innocence sharpened by confidence. He speaks in mild, unhurried tones, halting to look for the right words. On occasion, he breaks into an unexpectedly aggressive cackle, underscoring it with a clap of his hands and a merry roll of his eyes.

  Adams makes his way across a ravine to a modern warehouse. “My composing shed,” he calls it. There is a tradition of composers working in the woods; Sibelius’s Ainola is surrounded by a stand of forest, and Mahler wrote most of his symphonies in rustic one-room studios constructed to his specifications. Adams can claim the largest composing hut in history. He raises the overhead door and walks through the space, part of which is rented out to a woodcutter neighbor. There is a sharp smell of freshly cut redwood. He goes into a smaller room, where sheets of music paper are scattered around an electronic keyboard and a computer terminal.

  It is the year 2000, and Adams is writing an oratorio called El Niño—a latter-day, Spanish-inflected retelling of the Christmas story. He fiddles with the keyboard, commanding the computer to play an aria for mezzo-soprano and orchestra titled “Pues mi Dios ha nacido a penar,” or “Because My Lord Was Born to Suffer.” In meekly peeping tones, the computer sings a sinuous, long-breathed melody, twisting and turning over lullaby chords. After about fifty bars the music trails off into a single line. The composer stares at the floor, cupping his chin in his hand. Then he goes back to work, chipping away at the silence of everything that remains to be composed.

  After the End

  This has been a book about the fate of composition in the twentieth century. The temptation is strong to see the overall trajectory as one of steep decline. From 1900 to 2000, the art experienced what can only be described as a fall from a great height. At the beginning of the century, composers were cynosures on the world stage, their premieres mobbed by curiosity seekers, their transatlantic progress chronicled by telegraphic bulletins, their deathbed scenes described in exquisite detail. On Mahler’s last day on earth, the Viennese press reported that his body temperature was wavering between 37.2 and 38 degrees Celsius. A hundred years on, contemporary classical composers have largely vanished from the radar screen of mainstream culture. No one whispers “Der Adams!” as the composer of El Niño walks the streets of Berkeley.

  From a distance, it might appear that classical music itself is veering toward oblivion. The situation looks especially bleak in America, where scenes from prior decades—Strauss conducting for thousands in Wanamaker’s department store, Toscanini playing to millions on NBC radio, the Kennedys hosting Stravinsky at the White House—seem mythically distant. To the cynical onlooker, orchestras and opera houses are stuck in a museum culture, playing to a dwindling cohort of aging subscribers and would-be elitists who take satisfaction from technically expert if soulless renditions of Hitler’s favorite works. Magazines that once put Bernstein and Britten on their covers now have time only for Bono and Beyoncé. Classical music is widely mocked as a stuck-up, sissified, intrinsically un American pursuit. The most conspicuous music lover in modern Hollywood film is the fey serial killer Hannibal Lecter, moving his bloody fingers in time to the Goldberg Variations.

  Seen from a more sympathetic angle, the picture is quite different. Classical music is reaching far larger audiences than it has at any time in history. Tens of millions show up from night to night in opera houses, concert halls, and festival grounds. Huge new audiences have materialized in East Asia and South America. While the repertory is preternaturally resistant to change, it is being permeated by twentieth-century music. Stravinsky’s Rite, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony are beloved orchestral showpieces; works of Strauss, Janáček, and Britten have joined Mozart and Verdi in the opera repertory. Young audiences crowd into small halls to hear Elliott Carter’s string quartets or Xenakis’s stochastic constructions. Living composers such as Adams, Glass, Reich, and Arvo Pärt have acquired a semblance of a mass following. And a few farsighted orchestras have put modern repertory front and center: in 2003, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the visionary direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen, inaugurated Walt Disney Concert Hall with a program that included Ligeti’s Lux aeterna, Ives’s The Unanswered Question, and, naturally, the Rite. As the behemoth of mass culture breaks up into a melee of subcultures and niche markets, as the Internet weakens the media’s stranglehold on cultural distribution, there is reason to think that classical music, and with it new music, can find fresh audiences in far-flung places.

  There is little hope of giving a tidy account of composition in the second fin de siècle. Styles of every description—minimalism, postminimalism, electronic music, laptop music, Internet music, New Complexity, Spectralism, doomy collages and mystical meditations from Eastern Europe and Russia, appropriations of rock, pop, and hip-hop, new experiments in folkloristic music in Latin America, the Far East, Africa, and the Middle East—jostle against one another, none achieving supremacy. Some have tried to call the era postmodern, but “modernism” is already so equivocal a term that to affix a “post” pushes it over the edge into meaninglessness. In retrospect, modernism, in the sense of a unified vanguard, never existed. The twentieth century was always a time of “many streams,” a “delta,” in the wise words of John Cage. What follows is an aerial tour of an ever-changing landscape.

  Composing remains, as Thomas Mann’s Devil says, “desperately difficult.” Although vast quantities of music are being written down day by day—national websites display lists of 450 composers in Australia, 650 composers in Canada, several thousand in the Nordic countries—few of them have found an audience outside a relatively limited clique of new-music fanciers. Some specialize in “music for use,” writing for church choirs or collegiate wind bands or the soundtracks of video games. The majority make a living by teaching composition, and their students usually become teachers themselves. They may sometimes ask, with the title character of Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina, “What is it for?” They have read in books that their forebears humbled kings, electrified crowds, forged nations. Sooner or later they realize that modern popular culture has no place for a composer hero. The most celebrated composers are sometimes the unhappiest; György Ligeti, in his last years, was reportedly haunted by the feeling that he would be forgotten after his death, that he had outlived the age in which music mattered.

  Perhaps Ligeti was right; perhaps classical composition is being sustained past its date of expiration by the stubborn determination of those who perform it, those who support it, and, above all, those who write it. More likely, though, a thousand-year-old tradition won’t expire with the flipping of a calendar or the aging of a baby-boom cohort. Confusion is often a prelude to consolidation; we may even be on the verge of a new golden age. For now, the art is like the “sunken cathedral” that Debussy depicts in his Preludes for Piano—a city that chants beneath the waves.

  After Europe

  “The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler said to Sibelius in 1907. “It must be all-embracing.” Now music is the world; it has ceased to be a European art. You can use new works to draw a
map of the globe—from the orchestral works of the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe, which draw on the sounds and rhythms of the Australian outback, to R. Murray Schafer’s radical music-theater cycle Patria, which can only be performed in the forests and lakes of the Canadian north. A comprehensive list of significant voices in contemporary music would include Franghiz Ali-Zadeh of Azerbaijan, Chen Yi of China, Unsuk Chin of South Korea, Sofia Gubaidulina of Russia, Kaija Saariaho of Finland, and Pauline Oliveros of the United States. Composition has also ceased to be exclusively male; the preceding six composers are all women.

  In one of the primal scenes of modern music, Debussy fell in love with Javanese and Vietnamese ensembles at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889. Appropriately, the first internationally renowned composer to emerge from Asia—Tru Takemitsu—found his voice by listening to French music. Toward the end of the Second World War, soldiers and civilians on the Japanese home front constructed networks of underground bases, in anticipation of an invasion that never came. Takemitsu was stationed in one of these dugout fortresses in 1944, all of fourteen years old. Although no music aside from patriotic songs was permitted at the base, one day a kind-hearted officer ushered the child-soldiers into a back room and played them some records, using a windup phonograph with a bamboo needle. One disk had Lucienne Boyer singing “Parlez-moi d’amour.” Takemitsu listened, he later said, in a state of “enormous shock.” After so much sunless, soulless labor, that winsome chanson opened a world of possibility in his mind. Ever after, he honored the moment as the birth of his musical consciousness.