Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise

he's got audio samples galore over at therestisnoise.com, but i dunno if someone's done a comp of all that stuff ... incredible book.

Yeah a 2CD compilation of chamber works by these guys would be something I'd be up for.

Its a year and several threads on...just wondering if people who didn't listen to a lot of classical before opening this bk have listened to a bunch, gone to the odd concert and if so what was it?

Unfortunately I feel too set in my ways to ever pick this up :-( xp

i went into a short composed music phase after reading it. my ipod had to be refreshed around when i finished the book so for a while (about a week or two) i didn't have any rock music on my ipod, just some of the stuff ross discussed, though i got tired of that pretty quickly. also went to see a john adams opera (a flowering tree), which was fun.

I got Nixon in China and Strauss' Salome after I finished it, but haven't really followed up with much careful listening.

Got into Morton Feldman, Stockhausen, Mahler, Sibelius a bit after reading this ... Knew a little about them, but the book got me to go buy the records. Also made me start digging deeper into Stravinsky's later stuff. Oh and Shostakovich, too. I mean, there is a lifetime's worth of music in this book, for real.

Ah, nice. One of the marginal things I've picked up when this bk hit was the notion that lots of people were going to read it and get onto listening to the old records, maybe go to concerts that would never otherwise. As for myself I've never gotten into a type of music like that, it would usually be a paragraph length review, then I'd build an interest after trying lots of names and then start hunting for in depth books/histories...

Reading this just now. Not really living up to the hype, though it's good. Not interested in the reams of stuff about Britten and it was somehow inevitable that he would think the best thing Messiaen ever did was the piece inspired by America.

The best parts of the book IMO are the bits about Berg's operas. Ross is amazing there. Also the sections on Sibelius and Feldman are awesome. Sibelius is one my v favorite composers and has hardly ever been given his due in writings on the 20c (he was far more the modernist than he is perceived).

Tom D is it that you don't care for Britten's music or just don't care to know extraneous stuff abt him?

Both. The stuff on Sibelius definitely made me want to check the miserable old bastard out.

Five to start you on Sibelius:

1. Symphonies 4 and 7, Tapiola- Maazel/Vienna PO (Decca Legends)
2. Symphonies 5 and 6- Colin Davis/London SO (LSO Live label)
3. The Oceanides/The Tempest/Nightride and Sunrise- Segerstam/Helsinki PO (Ondine label)
4. Violin Concerto- zillions of eligible choices. Heifetz, Hahn, Kraggerud, Ida Haendel, Julian Rachlin are all great IMO.
5. Symphony 2, Luonnatar and Pohjola's Daughter- Bernstein/NYPO (Sony)

If u are on eMusic I can suggest some top choices from there instead.

Thanks, yeah, I'll get round to him someday I hope!

If u are on eMusic I can suggest some top choices from there instead.

I'd like these suggestions, please.

Well, since you can still cherry pick from certain classical labels on eMusic, here's what I say--

--Cherry pick Symphony 5 (4 credits) off the Colin Davis LSO disc listed above, then Symphony 6 (4 creds) off the BIS label (Vanska/Lahti SO)
--Get the whole Ondine disc of Symphony 4 and Pohjola's Daughter with Segerstam/Helsinki PO, even if it's a 12-cred DL. Vanska's 4th is too slow.
--If the Oceanides/Tempest/Nightride disc on Ondine, listed above, is on the 12-track whole album plan, get that. If it's not, cherry pick Oceanides off BIS (Vanska/Lahti SO again) and I guess hold off on the track-heavy Tempest music (but it's Sib's last major work for orchestra and you should hear it sometime).
--You could drop 12 credits on Heifetz in the concerto (coupled with Tchaikovsky I think?), or on Hilary Hahn (hers comes with a knockout Schoenberg concerto). Or just cherry pick the Kavakos/Vanska off BIS for 3 creds
--Cherry pick Luonnatar (Vanska/Lahti/BIS) and the Six Humoresques (Kang/Jarvi/Gothenburg SO/BIS)
--Cherry pick Colin Davis/LSO in the seventh symphony (LSO Live label)

This is a review of Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music, written by Franklin Cox, a cellist and composer that I really admire.

A few notes:

- Its a 45 page review (part one of two) of a book in five vols in several thousand pages.

- Learning much about historical methodologies, romanticism and modernism, politics and hsitory.

- It is very well-written, thorough and rigorous with long footnotes, not light and breezy like Ross, but if you wanted to pick up on the perils of writing a history -- and how the author's politics and nationality, which was touched on above -- can cause disruption to this kind of project, and also on the hurt that the 20th century (the last two hundred years of classical) has caused then let this be your guide, I say.

Ooh thanks! I have the Taruskin 19th century, Early 20th century and late 20th century volumes in PDF but haven't read any of them yet.

OK so I'm almost done with that Taruskin review PDF and wow I knew Taruskin was a crank and a scold but did not know what a real radical-reactionary he is. Astonishing that he was Oxford's man to do such a centuries spanning authoritative project. He's easily as far out as the young Boulez (in the opposite direction) but is way old enough to know better; he comes off, if Cox is to be believed (and the excerpts are pretty damning) like he wants to be a new Zhdanov.

Thanks a lot for posting it.

I came across more (potentially) cranky stuff from Taruskin in the comments section of this blog too btw.

Really like to read ”Prokofiev Hail… And Farewell?”

I trust Cox's compositions and playing of the Cello, so I think I'll trust his piece. Cox does try to give credit where he can but it must be hard when an entire tradition of musical avant-garde (that Cox is v much a part of) is getting thrashed. I hesitate because I don't know Taruskin's own writings that well, and like Mark (and Cox) says he does seem to be a good writer who knows early music.

Also I only found out recently that Charles Rosen died so onto this piece on Carter

Wait what WHAT? Rosen is dead?

Damn

The Romantic Generation is in like my top 5 non fiction works ever

totally missed rosen's death, and so close to carter's too

i liked that sense of contunuity with rosen, who studied with a pupil of liszt and then became one of the foremost interpreters/proselytizers for carter

re taruskin -- wouldn't you exactly expect the oup to give that history to a conservative?

i'm just kind of stunned here.

That book is fkin soul-stuff for me.

re taruskin but he's more than a conservative, that's like calling wolfowitz a conservative

taruskin used to be a serialist?

serially formed joeks

re taruskin -- wouldn't you exactly expect the oup to give that history to a conservative?

I would have expected this to be the work of several specialists, as it happens.

how big is it in total

some scholars are just born bigness queens

5 heavy volumes

they measure their worth in lbs rather than citations

Cox's PDF is not a review, it's a polemic. I enjoyed reading it, the Taruskin quotes he threads together make a strong case for his argument, and it seems like a helpful contrarian point of view for anyone to have in mind before diving into Taruskin's version of the 19th/20th centuries (good lord). but a lot of what he says I'd nearly take for granted; I know it's pretty shocking for Oxford to have granted their imprimatur to a single-author history, but it's so obviously one author's perspective that a lot of Cox's objections start to seem a little redundant.

I don't know, maybe when I read it I'll be equally outraged by all the subjective objectivity, but the audience-determined model of history that Taruskin apparently champions only makes me more curious to read it.

I will, in fact, be using this as my springboard to finally dip into the Taruskin books (of which I have 'The Nineteenth Century', 'The Early 20th c' and 'The Late 20c'). Where to start, though...

That audience model of history I could see working if he was writing about pop music that I have no doubt Taruskin detests. To apply it to the 12th century is incredibly bizarre, to say the least.

http://jeremydenk.net/blog/2011/10/16/taking-on-taruskin-2/

other Oxford histories use multiple specialist authors.

i still want to read Taruskin's book because i'm a sucker for big history and i'm a sucker for historians with blatant attitude, no matter how much i disagree. but i've been wanting to read a musicological history for a while now that isn't Ross - i like bits of his stuff but i find him a bit lightweight or pop-leaning?

any suggestions for a good book, especially anything on the last 150 years, especially focused on "Art music"?

For the earliest part of that timespan, Rosen's The Romantic Generation, my friend! You won't regret it.

the one that I'm most in line with that was written in the 60's is Peter Yates' "Twentieth Century Music": http://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Century-Music-Peter-Yates/dp/0047810041

I still like Paul Griffiths a lot, especially on the first half of the 20th century. The fact that the subtitles of nearly all of his books include the word 'Boulez' gives you a hint with the lens through which he sees everything that happens after 1950, but this one is still wonderful: http://www.amazon.com/Concise-History-Avant-Garde-Music-Debussy/dp/0195200454/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357341718&sr=1-1&keywords=paul+griffiths+avant+garde

The Stuckenschmidt book is still good too, lotza great pitchers of operas & scores: http://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-century-music-university-library/dp/B0007FND02

And my favorite recent book focusing on my favorite offshoot of all of this: http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Experimental-Music-Technology-Culture/dp/0415957826

But my favorite is Yates, he's the only one who really saw the turn towards music-as-sound rather than notes / serialism, and who talks about pop music & recordings in an integrated way instead of an alien strain to be feared or regretted

Ross' book in many ways comes across like a one-man antidote to Griffiths, slighting everything difficult he loves, lovingly going over everything he passed over as regressive or too mainstream. It was overdue, and I really enjoyed it despite not liking too much of the music he does, but I saw it as redressing the imbalance of the histories of 20th century that were written while it was still a contemporary music more than too much of a fresh reappraisal of the whole mess

thanks guys, i will explore. i think music-as-sound is definitely my own instinctive attitude but this year i really want to engage with other ways of thinking and try to get deeper into what i love in music and what i want from it

if music-as-sound is your instinctive attitude I recommend these as well

A History of 'Consonance' and 'Dissonance' - http://www.plainsound.org/pdfs/HCD.pdf

Meta / Hodos - http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/12/26/2703030//MetaHodos.pdf

I've heard of the Yates for years, never seen it around. $5 huh?

A book that takes account of the research on how Darmstadt came to be what it was; a book that not only talks about the role of John Cage as a Duchamp type artist-philosopher but tackles his central importance to the central European music of the likes of Lachenmann and Spahlinger (this requres the US-Europe divide to be dispensed with); a book that treats complexity like Rosen does, intelligently and seriously and playfully, as a facet present in all of classcal music, so this would look at the complexity in simplicity too; a book of approaches to opera and ethnic musics from the likes of Kagel and Schnebel and Finnissy, and finally a book that is not scared to talk about politics and what is outside the concert hall, that doesn't set the scene as in a fucking landscape painting. And finally...

That book is yet to be written. In the meantime there are articles and if you piece them together there are hints of what that could look like.

So I'm pretty much tearing through Taruskin's 'Late Twentieth Century' volume. I think it's just about ideal to prep yourself with that review/takedown just so's to have your BS detector on, but that said I'm enjoying it greatly. He certainly sees a moral perniciousness in the OG wave of total serialists, aleatorists etc but it's also abundantly clear that he admires Cage, Babbitt et al for their sheer firepower. Maybe he will become an intolerable scold as he continues (right now I am up to the Babbitt/Princeton math music chapter) but that hasn't happened yet.

In the first chapter he lets you know that as far as he's concerned the Cold War is THE prism through which to interpret everyone's activities in the post WWII arts. Fine, dude, I appreciate the disclaimer.

Anyone psyched for The Rest os Noise fest at the Southbank? Can't say I am, but some of the concerts are interesting.

But Pierrot Lunaire is on next Sunday.

And this is the best its gonna get. I see the season is based on The Rest is Noise, wonder what that means...if Webern was given "one page" I guess he shouldn't have been programmed. Then again you know its bullsht to ignore him. The composer of the century, easily.

Op.6 was just one of those 'life will never be the same' kind of things. Shame I probably won't be able to make that.

There is also a 'beginnings' of minimalism with a couple of pieces by La Monte Young.

Anyone psyched for The Rest os Noise fest at the Southbank? Can't say I am, but some of the concerts are interesting.

The website annoyed me so much that I gave up looking, but guy I know gave me a programme of events, agree that it's not that exciting really. Won't be here for the Second Viennese School concert either :((((

The website annoyed me so much that I gave up looking

yeah i just went looking for info on the LaMonte Young performances that xyzzz mentioned, to see if I might be down in London at the time, and it seemed impossible to find details anywhere. what a fucking disaster the SouthBank is these days (useless website, unadventurous programming posing as the cutting edge, dreary run of meltdown fests)

google "La Monte Young rfh" and you come up with the details.

thanks xyzzz - i can't go, anyway :-(

Alex Ross's talks from the weekend are online.

http://therestisnoise.southbankcentre.co.uk/explore/here-comes-the-20th-century#1

I went to the Aurora Orchestra's concert on the Sunday night. Two things in particular stood out. Firstly, that the audience were sat on the stage and in the choir and the orchestra faced 'backwards' (with their backs to the empty auditorium). This meant we were much closer to the orchestra than normal, and it was odd to think that the orchestra could actually see everyone in the audience for once.

Secondly, they had Edmund de Waal act as a sort of narrator during the concert (which was programmed to show the sort of music the Viennese listened to around the time Schoenberg composed Chamber Symphony No. 1. It really set the context of the piece. That was such a great idea (and completely in line with the idea behind the book), as I always wished I knew more about the history of the era when listening to classical music. Apparently they are doing this for other concerts during the season as well.

The South Bank website is still a disaster but I managed to find this press release with full details of what's happening this year (hope the link works):

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:FqTB-MVaMJsJ:ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/sites/default/files/press_releases/southbank_centres_2013-2014_classical_music_season_release.pdf+&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiGn1sgOvE_cTlzelsCqyIlvRI5zT4VyZjrfJvk17jPikp-uaW71sx_j5yY3hMcX6sdeElsYwPnn0R-BFc2tG7innY7wI8tM8unVbhcLCCnzfwGu30TIFFegaZhDXiCznidoHje&sig=AHIEtbSCR7b6azhVN86-6sJDGYPzQtS6WA

Very excited about the Glass/Reich weekend in November.

Thx Jill. Listening to the first lecture:

Now years ago Howard Goddall, a conservative-type who writes music for TV and has agreeable mannerisms that TV commissioning editors like (hes doing a History of Music I am going to laugh at if I ever get round to seeing an ep from), made a series on C4 on modern classical in several parts by focusing on four key figures (not gonna bother to look right now), one of whom ws Bernard Herrmann, which he made up this tangent to castigate serialism and said it was better at conveying certain dark emotions through film and THAT'S IT. It wasn't a symptom that it was actually perfectly ok to listen to in its own terms and maybe you should give it a go OH NO!

So years later you find pretty much the same thing: lets start from film. It was in Kubrick, etc. Later on (while looking at Debussy's atonality) he cites that it comes w/out the 'stereotypical harshness' but he's already implying there is one by citing those examples from film, really playing up to that. Instead of doing this he could've perhaps talked about Boulez and Debussy in terms of not only their affinity for Gamelan (apparent in Marteau..) but also how that lightness of touch is apparent in not only both these but in so much other French music. So the 20th century is like any other century but that would possibly kill the book.