The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Beethoven’s overture marches off to C-major jubilation. Stele, by contrast, limps through a parched, depopulated landscape. But the white-note chords at the end aren’t quite hopeless; they fall short of the total desolation of Adrian Leverkühn’s “I have found that it is not to be.” Instead, as Kurtág himself once indicated, in conversation with the conductor Claudio Abbado, they have the rhythm of a gaunt figure staggering on.

  After Britten

  The East Anglian coast looks much as it did when Benjamin Britten passed his childhood writing moody settings of Verlaine and listening to the crash of the German Ocean. On the Aldeburgh beach you still see the old houses of the town sloping against the sky, the tall chimneys of the Moot Hall, an old fishing boat resting on its side, nets and buoys scattered about. The Aldeburgh Festival continues to present Britten’s works in the local spaces for which he designed them. Yet the management has changed. The artistic director of Aldeburgh is the composer Thomas Adès, a worldly young man who was only five years old when Britten died. Adès has absorbed the full spectrum of twentieth-century possibilities and knows his way around pop. Yet he has a deep feeling for classical tradition, and as a pianist he plays Schubert as beautifully as anyone. He is, perhaps, Britten without the agony.

  Adès embodies the virtues of a musical culture that has long been the envy of the world, to borrow the title of Humphrey Carpenter’s history of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Nowhere are twentieth-century composers more central to the repertory: any British orchestra would offend its audience if it neglected the symphonies of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, while British opera houses give constant attention to the works of Britten and Tippett. The BBC itself has long promoted contemporary composers at the national level. A young composer such as Adès may lack the name recognition of an Elton John, but neither is he an invisible man on the margins of the culture: he has a reasonably broad and brightly lit platform on which to speak.

  The assimilation of new work into the mainstream is helped by the fact that the internal politics of modern music has never been as fraught in Britain as in continental Europe or America. The dominant twentieth-century trends have all found a native following, but without the constant background noise of ideological disputation. This may be because British music has no tragic past attached to it, no stain of totalitarian aesthetics.

  What results is a pragmatic, pluralistic musical culture where unexpected combinations are the rule. Michael Nyman’s score for Peter Greenaway’s indescribably bizarre film A Zed & Two Noughts, a comedy of genetics and decomposition, gives a courtly Baroque air to chugging minimalist patterns. George Benjamin’s Sudden Time merges the canyon colors of Messiaen with the urban polyrhythms of Elliott Carter. Jonathan Harvey’s Ashes Dance Back, for choir and electronics, uses spectral analysis in the IRCAM vein to shed an eerie new light on the centuries-old English choral tradition. The doleful D-minor chords that kick off Oliver Knussen’s Horn Concerto smack of Gustav Mahler, although the helter-skelter instrumental writing that swarms all around has the effect of shoving Mahler into the middle of Piccadilly Circus.

  Adès’s own Asyla, a four-movement symphonic work from 1997, exemplifies pragmatism in action. It cobbles together Ligeti’s crazy-quilt tonality, the player-piano polyrhythms of Conlon Nancarrow, the Nordic landscapes of Sibelius, and a dozen other choice sounds. The composer dramatizes his own struggle to define himself within and against modernity, seeking “asylums” of one kind or another. Splintered rhythms and microtonal tunings create disorder at the outset, but an old-fashioned, nobly expressive theme surfaces, sounding like the subject of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. The studious “classical” character of the first movement gives way to spacious melancholy in the second: shades of Wagner and Mahler glide through the orchestration. In the third movement, “Ecstasio,” the protagonist swears off solitude and ventures out on the town. The title comes from a favorite party drug of the nineties, and the orchestration reproduces the noise and ambience of a London club: big beats, chanting choirs, whoops, whistles, the buzz of the crowd, the thrill and danger of bodily contact. After this scary hedonism comes an attenuated, cryptic finale, in which a sequence of meandering chorales leads to a grand, dark, imperious chord of E-flat minor. The music then tapers into silence. It’s like a drunken shout in an empty street—Stephen Dedalus making his way home at the end of Ulysses, his mind spinning with epiphanies that he will forget in the morning.

  Nixon in China

  “I like to think of culture as the symbols that we share to understand each other,” John Adams says, walking in the woods and fields around his composing hut. “When we communicate, we point to symbols that we have in common. If people want to make a point, they reach for a reference. It might be a Woody Allen movie, or a John Lennon lyric, or ‘I’m not a crook.’” Adams wants his own music to play that role. His music floats the possibility of a twenty-first-century synthesis in which the dichotomy between tradition and avant-garde is given a well-deserved rest.

  Adams is a child of the twentieth century in all its manifestations. He came of age in the swinging sixties, but his childhood had something anachronistic, almost nineteenth-century, about it. He grew up in a white-steepled village in New Hampshire, a place that could have been composed by Charles Ives. His parents didn’t buy a record player until he was ten and never owned a television. Both were musicians—Adams’s father played the clarinet, his mother sang with big bands. His grandfather ran a dance hall called Irwin’s Winnipesaukee Gardens on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, where Adams would go in the summer with his family. Once, when Duke Ellington’s band came to play at Irwin’s, Adams got to sit for a moment next to the master on the piano bench.

  Steeped in big-band swing, European classics, populist Americana, and Broadway musicals, Adams had a rude shock when he went to college—Harvard, 1965—and discovered that contemporary composers spoke a different language. His principal teacher was Leon Kirchner, a Schoenberg pupil. By day, Adams would study the Second Viennese School, avant-garde techniques, musique concrète, and the writings of Boulez, persuading himself that musical language had to keep going forward. Indeed, he became so militant in his views that he wrote a letter to Bernstein berating him for the stylistic backwardness of Chichester Psalms. (“What about Boulez?” he queried.) At night, Adams would listen to Beatles records with his friends and wonder, as Reich had wondered when he alternated between Webern and Coltrane, whether he could unify his daytime and nighttime worlds.

  When Adams graduated from Harvard, his mother gave him a copy of John Cage’s Silence, which led him to question most of the musical convictions that he had held since childhood. Dreaming of Cagean liberation, Adams moved to San Francisco, where he worked odd jobs, took up teaching, and diverted small audiences with happenings and conceptual pieces. One work, Lo Fi, called for a random assortment of scratchy old 78-rpm records to be played on antiquated audio equipment for an hour or more. After a while, Adams found Cage’s aesthetic equally confining, and looked for a way out.

  Minimalism gave Adams his individual voice. His defining move was to combine Reich-Glass repetition with the sprawling forms and grandiose orchestration of Wagner, Mahler, and Sibelius. In 1985 he finished a forty-minute symphonic work called Harmonielehre, its title taken from the famous textbook in which Schoenberg first declared that tonality was dead. Adams’s Harmonielehre says, in essence, “Like hell it is.” Forty triple-forte chords of E minor set the piece in motion, their durations gradually diminishing and then lengthening again. This colossal opening, Adams said, was an attempt to capture something that came to him in a dream—an image of a huge oil tanker levitating from the waters of San Francisco Bay, its rusty hull gleaming in the sun. Within minutes decadent Wagnerian chords are proliferating everywhere, although they are filtered through the sensibility of a child of the sixties who once tripped on LSD while listening to Rudolf Serkin play Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy.

  Nixon in China, Adams’
s first opera, brings about an even more dramatic transformation of European form. Nothing seems more inherently unlikely than the idea of a great American opera—possibly the greatest since Porgy and Bess—based on the events surrounding President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. When the director Peter Sellars first proposed the subject, Adams assumed he was joking. At the premiere, which took place at the Houston Grand Opera on October 22, 1987, many critics thought the same. Yet Sellars knew what he was doing. By yanking opera into a universally familiar contemporary setting, he was almost forcing his composer to clean out all the cobwebs of the European past. Adams also had the advantage of an extraordinary libretto by the poet Alice Goodman. Many lines come straight from the documentary record—the speeches and poetry of Chairman Mao, the fine-spun oratory of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, the convoluted utterances and memoirs of Nixon—but they coalesce into an epic poem of recent history, a dream narrative in half-rhyming heroic couplets.

  Each character is sharply sketched: Mao brittle and piercing in his high tenor tessitura; Zhou visionary and elegiac in his baritone flights; Nixon at once pompous and insecure, his attempts at oratorical grandeur defeated by the lower demons of his nature. He introduces himself with the bravura aria “News Has a Kind of Mystery,” an exaltation of the electronically interconnected world. Nixon repeats his words as if caught in a loop—“News news news news news news news news news news has a has a has a has a kind of mystery”—and the orchestra chugs along in the manner of Duke Ellington’s locomotive numbers. Then Nixon digresses into a meditation on the American heartland, although the motoric patterns churn on beneath him, in keeping with the fact that the open prairie is now drenched in television blue:

  It’s prime time in the USA.

  It’s yesterday night. They watch us now;

  The three main networks’ colors glow

  Livid through drapes onto the lawn.

  Dishes are washed and homework done,

  The dog and grandma fall asleep,

  A car roars past playing loud pop,

  Is gone. As I look down the road

  I know America is good

  At heart…

  Then the idyll crumbles. A D-minor chord gives a sinister resonance to the word “heart.” Nixon’s mental eye drifts to enemies and subversives:

  The rats begin to chew

  The sheets. There’s murmuring down below.

  Now there’s ingratitude!

  Rasping trombone chords hint at the paranoid malice that will shortly drag Nixon down into the ignonimy of Watergate.

  Throughout, Nixon delivers a chilling overview of twentieth-century games of power. Many early viewers had no idea what to make of the studied ambiguity with which the creative team handled the main characters, and the complaints came from opposing points on the political spectrum: liberals protested the seeming romanticization of a criminal president while right-wingers disliked the emphasis on the poetic-philosophical side of the genocidal Mao. Are Adams and his collaborators besotted with the glamour of authority? Act I raises that suspicion, with its high-flown rhetoric, its giddy air of global camaraderie, its innocent shouts of “Cheers!” But Act II breaks the spell. After another ode to Americana, this one delivered by Pat Nixon, Chinese singers and dancers arrive to perform the ballet-opera Red Detachment of Women, which Goodman and Adams have reimagined on their own terms. It is a sadistic ideological entertainment from which the Nixons recoil in horror. The music mixes secondhand American pop with secondhand Strauss and Wagner, at one point mashing the Jochanaan theme from Salome into “Wotan’s Farewell” from Die Walküre. It’s a half-charming, half-repulsive simulacrum of totalitarian kitsch.

  Finally, Jiang Qing takes the spotlight. The Chairman’s wife exults in her ability to control culture and dominate people. As in Thomas Mann’s Faustian nightmares, bloodless intellectuality meets bloody barbarism. Adams’s music takes on an icy hardness: the amiable key of B-flat major is hammered into blue steel. On top is a limber vocal line that lies somewhere between the fateful choruses of Verdi and the bouncing operetta numbers of Gilbert and Sullivan:

  I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung

  Who raised the weak above the strong

  When I appear the people hang

  Upon my words, and for his sake

  Whose wreaths are heavy round my neck

  I speak according to the book.

  …Let me be

  A grain of sand in heaven’s eye

  And I shall taste eternal joy.

  The people shout along with her: “Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy!” Shostakovich could not have said it better.

  In the last act a mist of forgetfulness descends. The assembled potentates cease to be distinct historical characters and instead become vessels of one sadly remembering mind—perhaps the soul of the century itself. Nixon thinks back to his service in the Second World War, when good and evil were distinct. Mao recalls his idealistic youth. And Zhou, the conscience of the piece, falls into a reverie of doubt, asking himself whether reality had ever come close to what his high-flown rhetoric had promised:

  How much of what we did was good?

  Everything seems to move beyond

  Our remedy. Come, heal this wound.

  At this hour nothing can be done.

  Just before dawn the birds begin,

  The warblers who prefer the dark,

  The cage-birds answering. To work!

  Outside this room the chill of grace

  Lies heavy on the morning grass.

  No birds sing in Adams’s setting of these lines—not on first hearing, at least. Winding slowly upward in the cello is a familiar-sounding strain of lament: the American cousin of the cello solos in Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela. A surreal image comes to mind: Mao, Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai, the Nixons, and Henry Kissinger standing on a mythical island in a pitch-black river while the swan of death glides serenely around them.

  EPILOGUE

  Extremes become their opposites in time. Schoenberg’s scandal-making chords, totems of the Viennese artist in revolt against bourgeois society, seep into Hollywood thrillers and postwar jazz. The supercompact twelve-tone material of Webern’s Piano Variations mutates over a generation or two into La Monte Young’s Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. Morton Feldman’s indeterminate notation leads circuitously to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” Steve Reich’s gradual process infiltrates chart-topping albums by the bands Talking Heads and U2. There is no escaping the interconnectedness of musical experience, even if composers try to barricade themselves against the outer world or to control the reception of their work. Music history is too often treated as a kind of Mercator projection of the globe, a flat image representing a landscape that is in reality borderless and continuous.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the impulse to pit classical music against pop culture no longer makes intellectual or emotional sense. Young composers have grown up with pop music ringing in their ears, and they make use of it or ignore it as the occasion demands. They are seeking the middle ground between the life of the mind and the noise of the street. Likewise, some of the liveliest reactions to twentieth-century and contemporary classical music have come from the pop arena, roughly defined. The microtonal tunings of Sonic Youth, the opulent harmonic designs of Radiohead, the fractured, fast-shifting time signatures of math rock and intelligent dance music, the elegiac orchestral arrangements that underpin songs by Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom: all these carry on the long-running conversation between classical and popular traditions.

  Björk is a modern pop artist deeply affected by the twentieth-century classical repertory that she absorbed in music school—Stockhausen’s electronic pieces, the organ music of Messiaen, the spiritual minimalism of Arvo Pärt. If you were to listen blind to Björk’s “An Echo, A Stain,” in which the singer declaims fragmentary melodies against a soft cluster of choral voices, and then move on to Osvaldo
Golijov’s song cycle Ayre, where pulsating dance beats underpin multi-ethnic songs of Moorish Spain, you might conclude that Björk’s was the classical composition and Golijov’s was something else. One possible destination for twenty-first-century music is a final “great fusion”: intelligent pop artists and extroverted composers speaking more or less the same language.