Books & Poetry

To write a book that convincingly describes the path of classical music through the turbulent twentieth century is an act worthy of celebration. To write one, as Alex Ross has, that is entertaining, enlightening and inspiring to both devotees and less classically literate music fans is worth breaking out the bunting for.

Over 600 or so pages (including plenty of notes for the in crowd and a listening guide for beginners), New Yorker music critic Ross maps a route between a performance of Richard Strauss’s opera ‘Salome’ in 1906 and the premiere of John Adams’ ‘Nixon in China’ in 1987. He’s not afraid of using the language of formal music criticism to make his point – we are soon into triads, tritones and augmented chords. The nature of the work is that he can only flash a snap of each artist or work, but he demonstrates impressive depth of knowledge, from the cante jondo of Andalusian flamenco that inspired Debussy to a comparison between Missy Elliot and Timbaland’s ‘Wake Up!’ and Steve Reich’s ‘Different Trains’.

The thesis is something to do with atonality and the nasty events that made up much of the twentieth century. It feels unarguable, but a bit vague; really, it’s just a good jumping off point for talking about lots of skronky sounds, and it isn’t the book’s fault that the music doesn’t behave well enough to be stitched into a neater fabric.

The more casual reader will be pleased by the surfeit of extraordinary biographical incident – from the circumstances of the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time’ in Stalag VIII-A, to John Cale’s assertion that ‘six bars of the sonata for oboe’ was code for ‘six ounces of opium’ when he was a member of LaMonte Young’s far-out troop, the Theatre of Eternal Music. Ross’s estimable blog (therestisnoise.com) is stuffed with illustrative and decorative sound files.