![]() The soundtrack to history was written as history was being made music would never be the same, its very identity bent and shaped by the living things around it. So what happened? The 20th century happened, as Ross’ book exhaustively details: the rejection of bourgeois aesthetic and exclusivity, of composer as cultural hero multiple wars, Hitler and Stalin, and the reconstruction of musical taste post-WWII and the “contradiction” of a modern city like Paris, which “embraced all the fads of the roaring decade … yet beneath the ultramodern surface a 19th-Century support structure for artistic activity persisted.” The Rest Is Noise is effectively a history of the 20th Century, its new possibilities and grand tragedies, as seen through the prism of the modern-day composer. ![]() “At the beginning of the century, composers were cynosures on the world stage, their premieres mobbed by curiosity seekers, their transatlantic progress chronicled by telegraphic bulletins, their deathbed scenes described in exquisite detail.” ![]() “From 1900 to 2000, the art experienced what can only be described as a fall from a great height,” Alex Ross writes in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century. Alex Ross, from the epilogue to The Rest Is Noise ![]() Schoenberg’s scandal-making chords, totems of the Viennese artist in revolt against bourgeois society, seep into Hollywood thrillers and post-war jazz. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |