Author Events and Original Reviews

          Alex Ross’s wonderful book is about musical composition in the twentieth century. He is not that happy with its last decades. It is tempting to see an overall trajectory of decline in the audiences for serious music, he warns. Orchestra halls and opera houses are becoming part of the museum culture. Interest for classical music is dying, or better graying. (WUFT-FM recently dropped its classical music programming in favor of talk radio.)

          But on the other hand, classical music is reaching new audiences in East Asia and South America. China is training our classical musicians of the future. There are not fewer but more composers composing and looking for opportunities to be heard.

          Ross picks Gustav Mahler to begin an account of musical composition of the twentieth century. Mahler was director of the Vienna Court Opera, one of the most coveted jobs in all Europe. He left that in 1907 to come New York for an engagement at the MET, for which he was paid the present-day equivalent of  $6.5 million. A huge New York success, he stayed until his death in 1911.

          The American musical scene was, of course, dependent upon the European, as Mahler’s career suggests. And the European musical scene was increasingly dependent upon dead composers. Ross quotes some interesting statistics. In the late eighteenth century, 84% of the music played by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was by live composers. By 1855 that was down to 38%, and by 1870, 24%.  And that trend continued into the twentieth. Moreover as Mahler’s salary suggests, the world of classical music, like much of the entertainment industry, had become star-struck.

          Perhaps the singlely most famous moment in twentieth-century musical composition was on May 29, 1913. Igor Stravinsky’s ballet ‘The Rite of Spring’ was first performed in Paris, in a new auditorium, one of the many in Europe built to accommodate larger orchestras and large audiences. Both the ‘Rite’ and the choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky famously displeased the audience. Ross points out, however, that subsequent performances played to packed audiences and heckling was suppressed by the crowd itself.

          While Ross’s history is generally chronological, he has skillfully focused on one theme in each chapter. For example, he describes the several decades of composition in Stalinist Russia and the Russian careers of Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergie Prokofiev. Josef Stalin appreciated classical music and was not opposed to experimenting with new sounds and rhythms. He believed, however, that composers should intend their pieces to communicate with a mass audience. Shostakovich and Prokofiev were not opposed to that goal and welcomed his patronage. But there were risks; Stalin’s displeasure meant the end of a musical career, if not worse.

          Ross centers much of his history on the Austrian composer, Arnold Schönberg, and his twelve tone music. Schönberg is, Ross claims, the “patron saint of his century.” But while Schönberg revolutionized the art of harmony, he left untouched rhythm, structure, and form, leaving their transformation to others.

          Schönberg and his generation of composers had lived through the horrors of First World War I and the battle-field deaths of a generation of young Europeans, including many (would-be) musicians and composers. The dissonance, density, difficulty, and complexity of musical composition was attempting to address the violence of that war.

          Ross also contends that there was a decided authoritarian character to the advocates of twelve-tone music. They tended to view all past composition as a prelude to the present moment and disdained those who continued to compose ‘archaic’ musical forms. This is no better illustrated than the career of Aaron Copland, an American romantic, whom the advocates of twelve-tone music refused to take seriously. Ross regrets that earlier musical traditions were overwhelmed by an age of noise.

          Much of the music of the twentieth century requires huge orchestras, occasionally even multiple choruses, organs, solo voices, jazz bands, electronic elements, even garbage can lids. How can we afford these giant assemblages? Or is all this not as Ross contends, looking like a dead end.