The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  “There is a bit of me”: Alban Berg, Letters to His Wife, ed. and trans. Bernard Grun (St. Martin’s, 1971), p. 229.

  Dr. Wernisch: Hall, “Berg’s Sketches and the Inception of Wozzeck,” p. 15.

  Berg used both those operas: For the Salome comparison, see Josef Gmeiner, “Ideal und Bête noire: Richard Strauss—Alban Bergs beschädigtes Leitbild,” in Musica conservata: Günter Brosche zum 60. Geburtstag (Hans Schneider, 1999), p. 79. For Pelléas, see Hall, “Berg’s Sketches and the Inception of Wozzeck,” p. 10.

  Berg went so far as to conceal: For mention of the unwritten biography, see Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence, p. 306. For Berg’s urge to conceal the work on Wozzeck from Schoenberg, see Alban Berg, Briefe an seine Frau (Langen Müller, 1965), p. 457. For Schoenberg’s opposition to the project, see George Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg,Vol. 1: “Wozzeck” (University of California Press, 1980), p. 192.

  Salome chord: See the flute, trumpet, and harp figures in Act I, bar 370. For other occurences of this chord in Wozzeck, see Act III, bars 101 and 371, and, transposed, the sustained chord in Act III, bars 384–86. Helpful in tracking these down was Janet Schmalfeldt, Berg’s “Wozzeck”: Harmonic Language and Dramatic Design (Yale UP, 1983), pp. 125, 200, 205.

  a little Schoenberg: Anthony Pople, “The Musical Language of Wozzeck,” in Pople, Cambridge Companion to Berg, pp. 151–52, notices the quotation from the Five Pieces and speculates on other Schoenbergian subtexts in Wozzeck.

  “Like the murder”: Robert Cogan, New Images of Musical Sound (Harvard UP, 1984), p. 95.

  “a confession”: Alban Berg, “A Lecture on Wozzeck,” in Douglas Jarman, Alban Berg, “Wozzeck” (Cambridge UP, 1989), p. 169.

  Sonata in D Minor: For more, see Ulrich Krämer, Alban Berg als Schüler Arnold Schönbergs: Quellenstudien und Analysen zum Frühwerk (Universal, 1996), p. 165. For Helene’s request, see Reich, Alban Berg, p. 229; and Berg, Briefe an seine Frau, p. 487.

  “worldwide festival of death”: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (Knopf, 1995), p. 706.

  Berg…pointed out: Berg, “Lecture on Wozzeck,” p. 156.

  3. Dance of the Earth

  eighty-five degrees: Truman Campbell Bullard, “The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps” (Ph.D. diss., Eastman School of Music, 1971), vol. 1, p. 136.

  “There, for the expert”: Le Coq et l’Arlequin, in Oeuvres complètes de Jean Cocteau (Marguerat, 1946–51), vol. 9, pp. 46–47.

  zeppelin: Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (Yale UP, 2000), p. 277.

  “a new thrill”: Bullard, “First Performance,” vol. 3, p. 1.

  “a sacred terror”: RTS2, p. 1000.

  mutterings, titters: Alfredo Casella, Music in My Time, trans. Spencer Norton (University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), pp. 108–9.

  “Till the end”: From an interview with the composer included with Sony Classical’s Igor Stravinsky Edition, vol. 4 (SM2K 46 294).

  “The dancers trembled”: Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Da Capo, 1998), p. 68.

  “Shut up, bitches”: Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Doubleday, 1962), p. 164. See Doris Monteux, It’s All in the Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), p. 90, for “A bas des grues du 16ème!” See also Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (Norton, 1962), p. 47.

  Jeanne Mühlfeld: Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, p. 294.

  “One literally could not”: Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (Vintage, 1972), p. 129. Stein says that she attended the second performance, but it is more likely that her description applies to the May 29 premiere.

  applauding faction: Bullard, “First Performance,” vol. 2, pp. 31–32. For later performances, see ibid., pp. 91 and 107; SWS1, p. 232; and RTS2, p. 1032.

  “our slender bodies”: Translation by Thomas Land, included with Pierre Boulez’s recording of Cantata profana (DG 435 863-2).

  “The great thing”: Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (University of California Press, 1968), p 44.

  “just as it is”: Ibid., p. 45.

  Edison Bell cylinder: John Bird, Percy Grainger (Oxford UP, 1999), pp. 121–22. See also Gwilym Davies, “Percy Grainger’s Folk Music Research in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and Warwickshire, 1907–1909,” Folk Music Journal 6:3 (1992), pp. 339–58.

  damp, rundown schoolhouse: Mirka Zemanová, Janácč ek: A Composer’s Life (Northeastern UP, 2002), p. 12.

  “Flashing movements”: Ibid., p. 60.

  “Dobrývecčer”: Leos? Janácček, Letters and Reminiscences, ed. Bohumír S? te? dron?, trans. Geraldine Thomsen (Artia, 1955), pp. 94–95.

  “entire being”: Janácček and His World, ed. Michael Beckerman (Princeton UP, 2003), p. 246.

  “Innumerable notes”: Leos? Janácč ek, “How Ideas Come About,” in Janácček’s Uncollected Essays on Music, ed. and trans. Mirka Zemanová (Marion Boyars, 1989), p. 69.

  forty folk songs: Malcolm Gillies, Bartók Remembered (Faber, 1990), pp. 6–7. For other details, see Kenneth Chalmers, Béla Bartók (Phaidon, 1995); and Halsey Stevens, The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (Clarendon, 1993).

  Maxim Gorky: Documenta Bartókiana (Akadémiai Kiadó, 1964–81), vol. 4, pp. 38–40.

  “destructive urban influence”: Béla Bartók, preface to Rumanian Folk Music (Martinus Nijhoff, 1967–75), vol. 1, pp. 4–5.

  contaminating influence: Julie Brown, “Bartók, the Gyspies, and Hybridity in Music,” in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (University of California Press, 2000), pp. 119–42.

  strict tempo: See “Béla Bartók Replies to Percy Grainger” (1934), in Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (Bison Books, 1992), p. 224.

  “hateful”: Günter Weiss-Aigner, “The ‘Lost’ Violin Concerto,” in The Bartók Companion, ed. Malcolm Gillies (Amadeus, 1993), p. 469.

  “The essence of art”: Judit Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (University of California Press, 1998), pp. 163–64. For the following quotations, see pp. 148, 121, and 204.

  “The Arabs”: Béla Bartók Letters, ed. János Demény, trans. Péter Balabán and István Farkas (St. Martin’s, 1971), p. 122.

  sizable library: See Robert Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 30–31.

  “subtly authentic”: Gerald Larner, Maurice Ravel (Phaidon, 1996), p. 12.

  Falla, in his writings: As quoted in Federico García Lorca, “Deep Song,” in Deep Song and Other Prose, trans. Christopher Maurer (New Directions, 1975), p. 26.

  money from the Romanov dynasty: Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, pp. 167–73.

  “few points of sympathy”: “Busy Kaiser Wilhelm,” New York Times, July 26, 1891.

  “gusto”: Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Doubleday, 1959), p. 82.

  “beautiful, healthy”: Romain Rolland, Journal des années de guerre, 1914–1919 (Michel, 1952), p. 59.

  “His music reflects”: Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music (Little, Brown, 1951), p. 210.

  “This goes further”: Jann Pasler, “Stravinsky and the Apaches,” Musical Times 123 (June 1982), p. 404.

  “symphony” and “counterpoint”: RTS1, pp. 672 and 682.

  “It suppresses”: Jacques Rivière, “Petrouchka,” Nouvelle Revue Française 33(1911), p. 377.

  “Stravinsky is the only”: Ezra Pound, “Tibor Serly, Composer,” quoted in György Novák, “‘I am a Vi====olerplayer’ [sic]: Pound and Serly in the Early 1930s,” Americana 2:1, www.arts.u-szeged.hu/american/americana/volIIno1/novak.htm (accessed July 20, 2006).

  folkloric sources: RTS1, pp. 891–923.

  “a kind of apotheosis”: Béla Bartók Essays, p. 360.

  “great fusion”: RTS1, p. 965.
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  “You are truly”: See the chord combining a C-sharp dominant seventh and a D-major triad at 299 of Salome.

  “A silent accent”: A Virgil Thomson Reader (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 16.

  “Une musique nègre”: Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (Doubleday, 1960), p. 77.

  “Salt Peanuts”: Carl Woideck, Charlie Parker: His Music and Life (University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 162.

  spill his Scotch: Alfred Appel Jr., Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (Yale UP, 2002), pp. 59–60.

  As Bartók observed: Béla Bartók Essays, p. 41.

  As Lynn Garafola points out: Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, pp. 72–73.

  “There are works”: Jacques Rivière, “Le Sacre du printemps,” Nouvelle Revue Française 59 (Nov. 1913), p. 730.

  “infiltrations funèstes”: Jane Fulcher, “Speaking the Truth to Power,” in Debussy and His World, ed. Jane Fulcher (Princeton UP, 2001), p. 207.

  “universal formula”: Carol A. Hess, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 67–69.

  Seal Harbor, Maine: Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (University of California Press, 2003), p. 304.

  Albéric Magnard: Ibid., p. 433.

  “Both hands touch”: Russell Wortley and Michael Dawney, “George Butterworth’s Diary of Morris Dance Hunting,” Folk Music Journal 3:3 (1977), p. 204.

  “I don’t believe”: Arbie Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader (Columbia UP, 1990), pp. 162–63. Also p. 168.

  fighter plane: Watkins, Proof Through the Night, pp. 176–90.

  “the intolerable spirit”: Rolland, Journal des années de guerre, p. 61.

  early performances of Pierrot: Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (Doubleday, 1963), p. 53; Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 91.

  Taruskin is right: RTS2, pp. 988–1006.

  “sauce” and “atmosphere”: Rivière, “Le Sacre du printemps,” pp. 706–707.

  “each object”: Jacques Rivière, “La saison russe,” Nouvelle Revue Française 67 ( July 1914), p. 155.

  “By imperceptible degrees”: RTS2, p. 1006.

  “progressive abstraction”: Ibid., title of part 3.

  “a machine to hit”: Drue Fergison, “Bringing Les Noces to the Stage,” in The Ballets Russes and Its World, ed. Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer (Yale UP, 1999), p. 185.

  “leaning dangerously”: Claude Debussy, Correspondance, 1884–1918, ed. François Lesure (Hermann, 1993), p. 358.

  “Cher Stravinsky”: Ibid., p. 361.

  As Taruskin shows: RTS2, pp. 1486–99.

  “Austro-Boche miasmas”: Debussy, Correspondance, p. 361.

  March 23, 1918: Various articles in the New York Times, March 24–30, 1918.

  “hyper-alertness”: Wolfgang-Andreas Schultz, “Avant-Garde and Trauma: Twentieth-Century Music and the Experiences from the World Wars” (unpublished English translation), p. 10.

  “Boches!”: Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A iography (Nonpareil Books, 1986), p. 186. Other details, pp. 175 and 187.

  “The Titanic”: Frederick Brown, An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau (Viking, 1968), p. 128.

  “That Mysterious Rag”: See Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Clarendon, 1991), p. 133; and Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford UP, 1999), pp. 477–79.

  “For the first time”: Steegmuller, Cocteau, p. 185.

  “The nightingale sings badly”: Le Coq et l’Arlequin, p. 16. For other quotations, see pp. 39 and 26.

  “lie of the grand style”: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage, 1967), p. 157.

  “Banana lou ito kous kous”: Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Harvard UP, 1994), p. 105.

  “the steam-driven merry-go-rounds”: Darius Milhaud, Notes Without Music: An Autobiography, trans. Donald Evans (Knopf, 1953), p. 98.

  Vance Lowry: Jean Wiéner, Allegro appassionato (Belfond, 1978), p. 43.102 “a not unamusing place”: Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson, ed. Tim Page and Vanessa Weeks Page (Summit, 1988), p. 54.

  “Against the beat”: Milhaud, Notes Without Music, pp. 136–37. For Ellington at Capitol Palace, see Stuart Nicholson, ed., Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (Northeastern UP, 1999), pp. 29–31.

  “Little melodies”: Cocteau, Le Coq et l’Arlequin, p. 45.

  Antonio María Romeu: Milhaud, Notes Without Music, p. 91.

  Villa-Lobos speculating: See Gerard Béhague, Heitor Villa-Lobos: The Search for Brazil’s Musical Soul (University of Texas at Austin, 1994), pp. 5–6; and Eero Tarasti, Heitor Villa-Lobos: The Life and Works, 1887–1959 (McFarland, 1995), pp. 169–80.

  “unheard-of music ”: Claude Tappolet, ed., Correspondance Ernest Ansermet–Igor Strawinsky (1914–1967) (Georg, 1990–92), vol. 1, p. 48.

  Creole Band: Lawrence Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band (Oxford UP, 2005), pp. 160 and 193.

  “Jelly Roll Blues”: Gabriel Fournier, “Erik Satie et son époque,” La Revue musicale 214 ( June 1952), p. 130. The “compositions de Jelly Roll Morton” referred to here could only be “Jelly Roll Blues,” which was published in Chicago in 1915; nothing else by Jelly Roll was in circulation at the time.

  “the musical ideal”: Rolland, Journal des années de guerre, p. 852.

  “Dance must express nothing”: Steegmuller, Cocteau, p. 95.

  jazz ensembles: RTS2, pp. 1301–4, argues against a jazz influence, saying that the instrumentation is close to that of Eastern European Gypsy and klezmer bands. See also Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, pp. 103–104. For the makeup of the Creole Band, see the frontispiece photo of Gushee’s Pioneers of Jazz. Buddy Bolden’s pioneering group had the same makeup around 1900.

  “disappearance of the skyscraper”: Steegmuller, Cocteau, p. 259.

  “Adieu New-York”: Perloff, Art and the Everyday, pp. 173–75.

  “Already the influence”: Darius Milhaud, Études (Aveline, 1927), p. 22.

  “period modernism”: Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, pp. 90–115.

  “reconstitutes the past”: Sylvia Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (University of Rochester Press, 2003), p. 363.

  “the days of big orchestras”: Ibid., pp. 177–78.

  “I would like”: Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, p. 83.

  high-backed chair: Wiéner, Allegro appassionato, p. 57.

  “Madame la Princesse”: Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse, p. 235.

  asked to tone down: Milhaud, Notes Without Music, p. 159.

  “Le Train bleu”: Paul Collaer, Darius Milhaud, trans. Jane Hohfeld Galante (San Francisco Press, 1988), p. 78.

  “What’s good about Poulenc”: Renaud Machart, Poulenc (Seuil, 1995), p. 18.

  “modern fêtes galantes”: Francis Poulenc, My Friends and Myself (Dobson, 1978), pp. 43–44. For more description, see Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, pp. 129–32.

  “Defend me, Spaniards”: Hess, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, p. 170.

  “You were a friend”: Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, pp. 94–101.

  “We’re sinking”: Calvin Tomkins, “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” New Yorker, July 28, 1962, pp. 44–46.

  “My Octuor”: Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (University of California Press, 1979), pp. 574–75.

  “Even in the early days”: “Interview with Stravinsky,” Observer, July 3, 1921.

  “I consider music”: Igor Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie (DenoëłGonthier, 1962), p. 63.

  “Art never expresses an
ything”: Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Perennial Library, 1989), p. 991.

  Brunswick Records: SWS1, p. 406.

  Each movement of the Serenade: Ibid., p. 412.

  “open covenants”: Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (Random House, 2001), p. 57.

  “to shake the hands”: Paul Op de Coul, “Modern Chamber Music at the 1920 Mahler Festival: A Prelude to the International Society for Contemporary Music,” in Gustav Mahler: The World Listens (Het Concertgebouw, 1995), p. I.84.

  “Arnold Schönberg”: Steegmuller, Cocteau, p. 247.

  Pierrot lunaire: Wiéner, Allegro appassionato, pp. 50–51.

  “a nice person”: ASL, p. 69.

  “an exquisite boy”: Francis Poulenc, Correspondance, 1910–1963, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Fayard, 1994), p. 170.

  Hobsbawm writes: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (Abacus, 1995), p. 90.

  Martin: Brian Large, Martin (Holmes and Meier, 1975), pp. 39–40.

  “politics of style”: Bernard Holland, “Bringing Sibelius out of Bleak Oblivion,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1997.

  “To be frank”: David E. Schneider, “Bartók and Stravinsky: Respect, Competition, Influence, and the Hungarian Reaction to Modernism in the 1920s,” in Bartók and His World, ed. Peter Laki (Princeton UP, 1995), p. 186.

  “Here I am”: Correspondance Ernest Ansermet–Igor Strawinsky, vol. 2, p. 21.

  “Ravel, it’s a masterpiece”: Larner, Maurice Ravel, pp. 172–73.

  a bit of jazz: See Béla Bartók Essays, p. 350, for a brief mention of jazz in 1941. As Benjamin Such off observes in his notes, Mikrokosmos No. 151 is explicitly written in a Gershwin style. Contrasts, written for Benny Goodman in 1938, has jazzlike moments, as well as reminiscences of Balinese gamelan music.

  “racial impurity”: See Béla Bartók Essays, p. 31; and Brown, “Bartók, the Gypsies, and Hybridity in Music,” p. 132.

  “sufficiently modern”: Jan Maegaard, “1923—the Critical Year of Modern Music,” in The Nielsen Companion, ed. Mina Miller (Amadeus, 1995), p. 106.