The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  On one page of Carter’s Piano Concerto (1964–65), the strings split Xenakis-style into fifty parts, none the same as any other, while the winds and brass go every which way above. Shostakovich had written music like this in the first section of his Second Symphony, but here no redemptive revolutionary anthems save the day. The piano drives a wedge into the molten mass, representing, the composer later said, the individual’s struggle against the collective. Carter began writing the Piano Concerto in West Berlin, and the desperate vitality of that walled-in fragment of a city left audible traces on the music: rat-a-tat rhythms in the second movement echo the sound of machine guns at a U.S. Army target range.

  The tireless mechanism of Cold War cultural politics gave Carter’s international career an early boost. Although the First Quartet had little hope of charming American audiences of the period, it went over well in the new-music centers of postwar Europe. In 1954 the piece appeared on the program of a Congress for Cultural Freedom festival in Rome, Nicolas Nabokov having pulled the strings; as it happens, Nabokov and Carter had taught together at St. John’s College during the war. The following year Carter’s Cello Sonata was the only American work featured at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Baden-Baden, where Boulez’s Marteau had its premiere. After breaking with Cage, Boulez came to consider Carter the only American composer consistently worthy of his attention.

  Carter and Babbitt set the pace for a small army of American atonal and twelve-tone composers: Ralph Shapey, Charles Wuorinen, George Perle, Arthur Berger, Harvey Sollberger, Andrew Imbrie, Leon Kirchner, and Donald Martino, among others. Their ranks were augmented by émigré followers of Schoenberg, notably Stefan Wolpe, transplanted from Berlin to New York, and Ernst Krenek, transplanted from Vienna to Los Angeles. At one time or another the above-named taught at such leading universities as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley.

  These composers thrived on campus because of the undeniable intellectual solidity of their project: behind the modernity of the language was a traditional emphasis on the arts of variation and counterpoint. Commentators tended to lump them into the uninviting category “academic atonal” or “academic twelve-tone,” although each had a strong personality: Shapey, with his way of arranging jagged sonorities in a ritualistic procession; Wuorinen, with his flair for instrumental drama and his tonal surprises; Berger and Perle, with their love of clean melodic lines and euphonious chords. The average listener could, however, be pardoned for confusing them. Eschewing the audience-friendly gestures of the Copland era, they seemed concerned above all with self-preservation, with building a safe nest in a hostile world. Their theoretical essays could be interpreted as so much barbed wire to keep untrustworthy strangers at bay.

  In 1958, Babbitt enlivened the pages of High Fidelity magazine with an essay notoriously headlined “Who Cares If You Listen?”—the original title was “The Composer as Specialist”—that sounded the signal for strategic withdrawal:

  I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition. By so doing, the separation between the domains would be defined beyond any possibility of confusion of categories, and the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism.

  Schoenberg had stated back in the twenties that colleagues such as Hindemith and Weill would end up writing their “music for use” only for each other. Babbitt was saying the same thing to the leftover neoclassicists and populists of the fifties. But he got a little carried away. Even as the combative composer published his article, Broadway audiences were flocking to West Side Story, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, one of Babbitt’s own students.

  Bernstein was nearly John F. Kennedy’s mirror image. Both men were Harvard graduates (Bernstein class of 1939, Kennedy class of 1940). Both overcame historically marginal ethnic backgrounds ( Russian-Jewish and Irish) to reach the highest plateaus of American life. Both made for good TV (Bernstein delivered music-appreciation lectures on the Ford Foundation’s Omnibus program starting in 1954). Both harbored sexual secrets (whether gay or straight). And the skeptics duly wondered whether the charisma was only skin-deep. Kennedy fell victim to an assassin’s bullet before his promise could be measured against reality. Bernstein lived to a relatively grand old age, an aura of disappointment settling around him. Experts agreed that he had frittered away his gift amid glitzy conducting dates, media appearances, and “radical chic” parties at his apartment in Manhattan.

  Yet Bernstein’s failures outweighed many others’ successes. For a brief, shining moment—to quote from Kennedy’s favorite musical, Camelot—he took back the cultural middle ground that Gershwin had colonized in the twenties and thirties. Bernstein announced his grand project under the media glare of Omnibus in 1956. “We are in a historical position now similar to that of the popular musical theater in Germany just before Mozart came along,” he said. “What we’ll get will be a new form, and perhaps ‘opera’ will be the wrong word for it. There must be a more exciting word for such an exciting event. And this event can happen any second. It’s almost as though it is our moment in history, as if there is a historical necessity that gives us such a wealth of creative talent at this precise time.” The use of the phrase “historical necessity” was pointed; Bernstein was appropriating the jargon of new-music theorists such as Adorno and Leibowitz and deploying it to contrary ends.

  A rising young American composer of the mid–twentieth century was expected to make his mark with a symphony. Bernstein made a formidable contribution to the genre with his Jeremiah of 1942, whose setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah commemorated the suffering of the European Jews. But theater was his first and strongest love. In his undergraduate thesis at Harvard he envisaged an amalgam of all musical traditions—European and American, classical and popular, white and black. On moving to New York in 1942, he set about making that vision a reality. First in the Jerome Robbins ballet Fancy Free, then in the Betty Comden and Adolph Green musical On the Town, he applied his high-class training to the seemingly lowly subject matter of three sailors on leave in the city. “New York, New York,” the signature number of On the Town, begins with a four-note rising figure that might have been lifted from the opening bars of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. The same motif appears in the 1952 opera Trouble in Tahiti, where a jazzy, finger-snapping idiom conveys a savage satire of middle-class neurosis. The four notes now spell out the word “suburbia,” puncturing the facade of America’s postwar prosperity.

  Bernstein’s most dazzling transmutation of tradition took place in “Somewhere,” from West Side Story, where the main theme of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto becomes the love song of a white boy in love with a Puerto Rican girl in the gang-ridden neighborhoods of Manhattan’s West Side. It was a theft with a political slant: Beethoven Americanized and miscegenated.

  West Side Story is a beautifully engineered piece of pop theater, fueled by bebop melody, Latin rhythm, and old-school Tin Pan Alley lyric craft. It is also a sophisticated essay in twentieth-century style. The first bars of the prologue put forward a familiar complex of intervals: a fifth plus a tritone. This combination appears everywhere in the music of Schoenberg and his pupils, emblematic of eternal striving and conflict. Similarly charged, the two intervals form the kernel of Bernstein’s score, and they are planted in its most famous melodies. Sometimes they express late-late-Romantic yearning: in Tony’s love song “Maria,” the first two notes spell out the tritone while the third goes one half step higher to reach the perfect fifth. But when this group of notes is arranged as a rising fourth plus a rising tritone it be
comes a motif of “hate,” of the endless gang conflict of the Sharks and the Jets. Later, in “Cool,” something like a twelve-note series is used to propel a bebop fugue. All told, West Side Story has every right to be considered an uncompromisingly modern work: it is bold in language, unpredictable in its stylistic turns, politically engaged, steeped in contemporary American life.

  Bernstein now made a fateful decision. Just as the musical had its out-of-town opening, in Washington, D.C., he accepted an offer to become music director of the New York Philharmonic, where an old friend—Carlos Moseley, ex–music officer of Bavaria—was rising to the top of the administrative hierarchy. Perhaps Bernstein thought that he could manage like his idol Mahler, conducting during the season and composing in the summer. But Mahler didn’t do lectures, talk shows, quiz shows, parties, and political speeches. Bernstein certainly accomplished great things at the Philharmonic—his masterly Young People’s Concerts, his promotion of fellow American composers, his rediscovery of Charles Ives—but in eleven years he produced only two major works, the immaculately crafted Chichester Psalms and the queasily preachy Third Symphony, Kaddish. Meanwhile, the tenement neighborhoods of West Side Story had been razed to make room for the high-culture colossus of Lincoln Center, the orchestra’s new home. If Bernstein resigned himself to living out his days as an interpreter of other people’s music, none other than Copland may have been responsible for implanting that idea in him. Back in 1943 Copland had written a letter saying, “Don’t forget our party line—you’re heading for conducting in a big way—and everybody and everything that doesn’t lead there is an excrescence on the body politic.”

  Upon leaving the Philharmonic in 1969, Bernstein struggled to recommence his interrupted compositional career. For the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, Jackie Kennedy, now Mrs. Aristotle Onassis, commissioned from him the theater piece Mass, a kaleidoscopic blend of sacred settings, show tunes, and Beatles-era pop. As often in Bernstein’s later music, cringe-inducing moments coincide with heart-filling ones: the crystalline setting of the words “I will sing the Lord a new song” would suffice to ensure the composer’s immortality.

  Mocked by critics for his presumption, Bernstein threw himself back into conducting. A promised opera on the Holocaust never surfaced. Ironically, Bernstein’s successor at the Philharmonic was Pierre Boulez, who also had trouble maintaining his creative momentum amid a flurry of conducting dates. That Bernstein and Boulez should have ended up with the same job description—celebrity maestro with a major-label contract—neatly confirms Charles Péguy’s dictum about everything ending in politics, or, as the case may be, economics.

  Bernstein poured his unfulfilled ambition into stupefying powerful performances of the Mahler symphonies, freighting them with the themes that he should or would have addressed in his own music if only he had the time or the energy or whatever it was that he ultimately lacked:

  It is only after fifty, sixty, seventy years of world holocausts, of the simultaneous advance of democracy with our increasing inability to stop making war, of the simultaneous magnification of national pieties with the intensification of our active resistance to social equality—only after we have experienced all this through the smoking ovens of Auschwitz, the frantically bombed jungles of Vietnam, through Hungary, Suez, the Bay of Pigs, the farce-trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the refueling of the Nazi machine, the murder in Dallas, the arrogance of South Africa, the Hiss-Chambers travesty, the Trotskyite purges, Black Power, Red Guards, the Arab encirclement of Israel, the plague of McCarthyism, the Tweedledum armaments race—only after all this can we finally listen to Mahler’s music and understand that it foretold all. And that in the foretelling it showered a rain of beauty on this world that has not been equaled since.

  Bernstein’s enthusiasm for Mahler was infectious, but his claims were exaggerated. In twentieth-century music, through all the darkness, guilt, misery, and oblivion, the rain of beauty never ended.

  12

  “GRIMES! GRIMES!”

  The Passion of Benjamin Britten

  Aldeburgh is a windswept fishing town on the east coast of the British Isles. “A bleak little place; not beautiful,” the novelist E. M. Forster called it. He went on: “It huddles around a flint-towered church and sprawls down to the North Sea—and what a wallop the sea makes as it pounds at the shingle! Near by is a quay, at the side of an estuary, and here the scenery becomes melancholy and flat; expanses of mud, saltish commons, the marsh-birds crying.”

  Some decades later, the great German writer W. G. Sebald fell even more deeply in love with the oblique charms of Aldeburgh and neighboring villages, and devoted his book The Rings of Saturn to the geography and history of the region. “I had not a single thought in my head,” Sebald wrote, describing one of his walks across the flats. “With each step that I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater and the silence more profound…I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe.”

  There are ruins all around Aldeburgh. At Dunwich, a few miles up the coast from Aldeburgh, an entire medieval town has slid into the sea. Around Orford, to the south, the landscape is dotted with relics of two world wars and the Cold War that followed—gun emplacements, designed to impede a Nazi invasion that never came; radar masts, employing the technology invented by researchers in nearby Bawdsey Manor; Atomic Weapons Establishment facilities, looking like skeletons of palaces. When the weather changes, these wide-open vistas of sea and sky, with their stone and metal memories of the past, can have a somewhat terrifying effect. A mass of black cloud rears up behind a sunlit scene; the sea turns a dull, menacing green; an abandoned house groans in the wind. Then, in the next second, the light changes. The water assumes an iridescent color, as if lit from within. Anonymous jewels sparkle in the beach. The sun appears under the ceiling of cloud and floods the world.

  In the Aldeburgh churchyard lies Benjamin Britten. He was born thirty miles up the coast, in Lowestoft, in 1913. His childhood home looked over the beach to the North Sea, or the German Ocean, as it was called before the First World War.

  Britten lived for most of his life in the Aldeburgh area, and he once stated that all his music came from there. “I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships,” he said in a speech in Aspen, Colorado, in 1964. “I want my music to be of use to people, to please them…I do not write for posterity.” Britten designed many of his pieces for performance in Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall and in churches around the area. In 1948, with his companion, the tenor Peter Pears, and the writer-director Eric Crozier, he founded the Aldeburgh Festival, which featured his own music, contemporary works from Europe and America, and favorite repertory of the past; it was a kind of anti-Bayreuth, as intimate as Wagner’s festival was grandoise.

  Above all, Britten wrote Peter Grimes, an opera of staggering dramatic force that is soaked in Aldeburgh to its bones. First heard in June 1945, one month after the end of the European war, it tells of a fisherman who causes the death of his apprentices and loses his mind from guilt. The story comes from the poet George Crabbe, who grew up in Aldeburgh in the later eighteenth century, and apparently based the character of Grimes on a real-life case. Crabbe described the estuaries thus:

  The dark warm flood ran silently and slow;

  There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,

  There hang his head, and view the lazy tide

  In its hot slimy channel slowly glide…

  Here dull and hopeless he’d lie down and trace

  How sidelong crabs had scrawl’d their crooked race;

  Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry

  Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye…

  The first orchestral interlude in Britten’s opera brings the coast to life. High grace notes mimic the cries of birds; rainbowlike arpeggios imitate the play of light on the water; booming brass chords approximate the thudding of the waves. It is rich, expans
ive music, recalling Debussy’s La Mer and Mahler’s more pantheistic moods. Yet it hardly ravishes the senses: the orchestration is spare, the melodic figures are sharply turned, the plain harmonies flecked with dissonance. The music is poised perfectly between the familiar and the strange, the pictorial and the psychological. Like the tone poems of Sibelius, it gives shape to what a wanderer feels as he walks alone.

  In his Aspen speech Britten provocatively compared the regimentation of culture in totalitarian states to the self-imposed regimentation of the avant-garde in democratic countries. Any ideological organization of music, he said, distorts a composer’s natural voice, his “gift and personality.” Everything about Britten’s style—his deliberate parochialism, his tonal orientation, his preference for classical forms—went against the grain of the postwar era. Luminaries of the avant-garde made a point of snubbing him; at the Dartington Summer School in 1959, Luigi Nono refused to shake his hand. Much else about Britten was at odds with Cold War social norms: his pacifism, his leftism, and especially his homosexuality.

  Nonetheless, Britten succeeded in becoming a respected national figure, a focus of British pride. He was a little like Sibelius, a lonely, troubled man who became a patriotic icon. Even closer in temperament was Dmitri Shostakovich, whom Britten got to know in the 1960s. Despite the language barrier, the two composers formed a lasting bond. What they had in common was the ability to write elusive emotions across the surface of their music. Britten made his inner landscape as vivid as the rumble of the sea, the cries of the gulls, and the scuttling of the crabs.