Listening to the Music of the 21st Century

“I’m not ready to make nice,” wails Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, claiming to be “mad as hell,” and wondering how someone could possibly feel so angry over something she said that they would send her a letter threatening her life. Sadly, this letter was not something she invented; not only were concert sales destroyed following her public criticism of President George W. Bush in 2003, but she also received multiple death threats from people who found her beliefs, and specifically her willingness to speak up against the government, to be an outrage. The above song, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” was released in 2006 and embodied the Dixie Chicks’ refusal to give in to pressures to keep politics out of their music.

Musicians have always found ways of making statements about the world around them in their music, providing a lasting, first-hand commentary on historical events. In his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, compiles these first-hand accounts to form a sort of history book told through music. In prose rich with musical terminology, Ross examines how historical events in the twentieth century have been reflected in the music of the time from the point of view of the composers, and even goes as far as to describe how the reverse can occur: how music can influence history. After following Ross’s guided tour through the past century of music, one then feels equipped to apply his ideas to the present and future of both music and politics, specifically as it relates to composers, songwriters, and producers of today.

As opposed to other books of history which present everything from an outsider’s point of view, Ross shows the composers in a close-up, writing their stories almost like characters in a novel. The language is, not surprisingly, past tense, but one can sense a drama unfolding, particularly with Ross’s extensive descriptions of events through scene imagery. In his first essay, “The Golden Age,” Ross writes of Richard Strauss’s piece, “The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and word had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale…based on a play by a British degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company” (3). By using phrases from the common speech of the time that rarely appear in print such as “word got out” or “in polite company,” the reader feels a sense of connection with the composers, making them go beyond being just composers and into the realm of being friends.

Works by these composers undergo a similar treatment. Rather than merely mention a piece and its overall significance, Ross, a musician himself, goes through incredibly deep analyses of classical works. A simple melody line can become a scene, or even a commentary on human life, in Ross’s eyes, as when he writes of Strauss’s Salome, “From the start, we are plunged into an environment where bodies and ideas circulate freely, where opposites meet. There’s a hint of the glitter and swirl of city life: the debonairly gliding clarinet looks forward to the jazzy character who kicks off Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue” (7). Without even hearing the piece, a description like this puts a very clear image into the reader’s head, not only of sound but of sight as well. Ross’s descriptions become even more exciting when he has the story of an opera or ballet to summarize in addition to his musical interpretation. In only one page, the reader is given a general overview of both the story of an opera like Salome and the music in the opera, and does not at all feel slighted.

These descriptions along with Ross’s clear, musical prose help keep the readers’ interest despite the fact that the book is really a history book in disguise; he makes a potentially boring subject exciting. He includes musical terms in regular speech, like when he describes in the essay “Doctor Faust” a, “slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval…” (33). An overtone is something common to musicians, being a note higher than a played note that are heard within the sound of a played note, as if both notes were struck together. While a non-musical person may understand the sentence, it takes a musician to really make the strong conceptual connection implied by Ross’s terms. Aside from simply borrowing musical terms in his speech, his writing style itself has a very musical element to it. Reading his text is very much like listening to Mozart, whose music is generally praised as having a fluid quality to it. Each note of Mozart leads to the next, as if Mozart simply wrote one note on the page, and that note wrote the next note, and so on until the piece was completed. Ross’s words share this flow, leading the reader through logical setup and resolution as he travels along in history.

Being a book of history, Ross finds himself interpreting historical events just as often as he interprets musical ones, and he writes about the two in a very similar fashion. His prose does not change through discussions of opera, ballet, musical works, politics, wars, Nazis, and death, forcing the reader to look for connections between distant concepts. In many cases, they even become intertwined, as he writes in “Music for All,” “On August 7, 1945, the day after the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima, Stravinsky added an extra pulse to the final chord [of his symphony], perhaps by way of honoring the immense military might of the country of which he was about to become a permanent citizen” (299). There may be no real connection between the duration of the final chord of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements and the military prowess of the United States, but Ross’s way of combining the two ideas forms a connection, if it did not already exist.

But, the evidence suggests that there was such a connection. According to Ross, “Stravinsky later cited newsreel footage of goose-stepping soldiers as a source of inspiration,” and included war-like sounds in the music (299). This war imagery may not be immediately noticeable to the audience, but it is likely that Stravinsky wanted to include some commentary on World War II in his writing. It is difficult for anyone to function in society without some form of political opinion, and artists like Stravinsky in the 20^th century and the Dixie Chicks today are notorious for including their opinions in their art, whether it is painting, orchestral composition, songwriting, sculpture, photography, or any of a thousand other forms. Music in particular can be affected not only by adding lyrical imagery that many can enjoy, but by making shifts in music theory bases and overall sound qualities to create auditory imagery as well. “For a hundred years or more, masters from Austria and Germany had been marching music into remote regions of harmony and form,” Ross writes, “Their progress ran parallel to Germany’s gestation as a nation-state and its rise as a world power.” As German politicians and composers gained dominance, composers like “Debussy and Satie began to seek a way out…” (77). Ross spends a great deal of time examining Germany’s rise to power, and Nazism in particular, which seems fitting considering it had a huge social impact in the 20^th century. Everyone knows of the changes Hitler caused, but few know of how deeply he affected classical music, as Ross describes in the essay “Death Fugue,” writing, “In the wake of Hitler, classical music suffered…incalculable physical losses—composers murdered in concentration camps, future talents killed on the beaches of Normandy and on the eastern front, opera houses and concert halls destroyed, émigrés forgotten in foreign lands…” (306). Just by virtue of taking the lives of many potential music revolutionaries, Hitler shaped the way music developed.

It should be no surprise, then, that following Hitler’s suicide, one of the measures taken to thwart supremacy by other nations was what is known as “psychological warfare.” As Ross outlines in “Zero Hour,” “Psychological warfare meant the pursuit of military ends by nonmilitary means, and in the case of music it meant the promotion of jazz, American composition, international contemporary music, and other sounds that could be used to degrade the concept of Aryan cultural supremacy” (346). The music of other cultures was introduced by the military to try to reverse everything that Hitler did to shut out others and place his race and his supremacist goals above everyone else. By merely exposing the people of Germany, particularly anyone who followed Hitler, to these types of music, there was a forced cultural diffusion. Jazz music is generally connected to African-American origins, so if Germans could be exposed to this type of music (and hopefully enjoy it), their ideas of cultural supremacy might change. No longer is history merely affecting music, but music is affecting history as well.

Richard Wagner is an important figure in this regard. As Ross notes, those responsible for many social movements (good and bad) cited Wagner and his operas as inspiration for either their ideas or a means to their ideas, including ultranationalists, liberalists, bohemians, African-American activists, feminists, Zionists, and Anti-Semites (12). It is no coincidence that Wagner was one of Hitler’s favorite composers for his Anti-Semitic ideas; Hitler was an avid classical music fan. Ross even goes as far as to say, “Classical music was one of the few subjects, along with children and dogs, that brought out a certain tenderness in Adolf Hitler” (305).

But, as Ross points out, the term “classical music” no longer refers to a specific genre. It has broadened to encompass both orchestral and avant-garde, baroque and electronic, a fact that makes its future hard to pin down. Ross avoids the topic for most of the book, not even making any definitive statements in the final essay about the future of classical music. Rather, he saves it for the Epilogue, where he argues that the Pop or “mainstream” genre and the classical genre, though generally pitted against each other, may be coming closer together. Pop increasingly uses elements of classical compositions, or instruments associated with classical music, and even the growing popularity of artists like Josh Groban, an almost operatic baritone, and classical music increasingly pulls in the exuberance of Pop music. “Composers may never match their popular counterparts in instant impact, but, in the freedom of their solitude, they can communicate experiences of singular intensity,” writes Ross, leading us to wonder what sort of sub- and combo-genres will emerge in the coming years (543).

Generally, classical music is known for showing its imagery through the music itself, using complex chords, timbres, and instrument combinations to create the desired feelings. Pop, on the other hand, is known for imagery in its lyrics. While the lyrics in “Not Ready to Make Nice” are powerful and hold great meaning, the chords are the same as in all the other Dixie Chicks songs (and most of Pop music). The song, although it has angry lyrics, does not sound angry. If Ross is right, then a combination between classical and Pop music could emerge which does both, a genre that I like to call “Popsical.” Broadway songwriters like Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown are already writing in a Popsical style, marrying powerful and imagery-rich music to even more powerful and imagery-rich lyrics. However, these songs are usually specific to a plot or text, and therefore stay out of the mainstream which is dominated by 3- to 4-minute bits of sound. Interestingly enough, Ross himself uses the term “Popsical” once in his online blog based on his book, when reviewing an attempt of the producers of Bang on a Can to have the public name their writing style. But, he does not like the term “Popsical,” or any of the others that were suggested by the public, including “Adventure Classical,” “Dismalism,” and “Post Secondary Modernists,” because he feels they imply that this music is, albeit influenced by classical, a move away from classical music. The terms, to a small degree, support the argument held by many that classical music is dying or dead. In the same article, Ross writes, “I have thought long and hard about this matter and come to the conclusion that the death of classical music is dead, and that all stories about this non-topic — including those protesting that classical music isn't dead after all, as well as those protesting that the entire discussion is a waste of time — are a waste of time” (“Dispassionate spasmodicism”). Classical music is alive and kicking, but it has changed, something it must continue to do before it can become as culturally important as it was throughout the history about which Ross writes.

Works Cited

Dixie Chicks. “Not Ready to Make Nice.” Taking the Long Way. Open Wide/Columbia, 2006.

Ross, Alex. “Dispassionate spasmodicism?” Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise. 1 Feb, 2005. 6 December, 2007.

Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

“The Golden Age: Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siècle.” 3-32.

“Doctor Faust: Shoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality.” 33-73.

“Dance of the Earth” The Rite, the Folk, le Jazz.” 74-119.

“Music for All: Music in FDR’s America.” 260-304.

“Death Fugue: Music in Hitler’s Germany.” 305-339.

“Zero Hour: The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945-1949.” 344-354.

“Sunken Cathedrals: Music at Century’s End.” 512-539.

“Epilogue.” 541-543.