Alex Ross Really Knows His Noise

Classical music, it appears, did not die a lingering death at the end of the 19th century. It is alive and well today, but not only that—it is much more accessible than you might think.

This accessibility is in part thanks to the New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross, today’s quintessential spokesperson for classical music. He is poised to revive the genre once more, both in his first book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, and in the flesh, right here at Columbia. The Blue Notebooks, a student-run organization dedicated to bringing authors, artists, and thinkers to the Columbia campus, will be hosting an interview with Ross tonight at 8 p.m.

Readers of the New Yorker are already familiar with the lively and erudite style of Ross’ reviews of classical music. Regardless of how much or how little you know about or are interested in classical, his reviews are genuinely enthralling. In Ross’ world, music exists in one big continuum, and the frontiers between genres—and between music and other forms of artistic expression or even history itself—are less imposing than they appear. In The Rest is Noise, Ross aims to further break down the boundaries between classical and popular repertories to show that there is no musical language that is intrinsically more modern than any other, and to illustrate the ways in which pop and classical music influence one another.

Beginning with the 1906 premiere of Strauss’ opera Salome in the Austrian city of Graz, Ross takes his reader on a musical tour through Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, all the way through to Steve Reich’s apartment in New York City in 2000. Alongside composers such as Mahler, Bartók, Ives, and Cage, Ross profiles Orson Welles, John F. Kennedy, W.H. Auden, Picasso, and David Bowie, subtly and cleverly leading the reader to the connections between these figures from different spheres of life. We discover, for example, the ties between Bernstein’s West Side Story and Schoenberg’s avant-garde artistic compositions.

Ross’ strong point is his methodology: he systematically breaks down the 20th century into three chronologically-ordered periods, and within each of these he identifies an artistic current or movement and two or three representatives thereof. He illustrates his points with specific examples from the oeuvres of those representatives. The Rest Is Noise is also craftily held together by recurrent motifs that are weaved throughout the book, much like a theme in a musical composition. This organization and Ross’ smooth, lucid style of writing make the book an easy read. At 600 pages, it also reads fast.

The broadness of the historical context, which could have been off-putting, is contrasted and made palatable—downright delicious, in fact—with anecdotes from the lives of the artists he mentions. The subtitle Listening to the Twentieth Century is meant literally: Ross presents the history of the past 100 years not only as someone who’s listened carefully to the collective hum of the century’s ups and downs, but as someone who can hear the beauty in any dissonance enough to call it music.

For the most part, Ross manages to convince the reader to hear this music too. One minor quibble: along the way, Ross tends to indulge himself in technical terminology that might be beyond some readers. Although he explains in the preface that his book “is written not just for those well versed in classical music but also—especially—for those who feel passing curiosity about this obscure pandemonium on the outskirts of culture,” readers not versed in classical music composition might find some passages frustrating. Although listening to the recommended-listening list is a help, one would really like to have Ross standing by to explain exactly what he means when he says that Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm” is “a study in aural sleight of hand” whose “melody unfolds in three helter-skelter phrases, each made up of six eighth notes plus an eighth-note rest” and why this matters to the history of classical music.

Ross also doesn’t always tie back these passages to his central argument about the artist or movement, occasionally leaving the reader with what amounts to a meaningless slew of information. That being said, Columbia students are in luck, since Ross will be available for questioning at Monday’s event. The Blue Notebooks “prides itself on interviewing/harassing authors, artists, and thinkers,” says the groups’ founder, GS student Lyndon Park. In inviting Ross, he promises a very lively discussion of the book, and of the “interesting, hybridized state of classical music today.”

Copies of the book itself, which Bjork recently said “will rekindle anyone’s fire for music,” will also be available, with Ross standing by to sign them.