The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  “Vous êtes merde!”: Peyser, Boulez, p. 39.

  turning his back: Henri Dutilleux: Music—Mystery and Memory: Conversations with Claude Glayman, trans. Roger Nichols (Ashgate, 2003), p. 36.

  “I believe that music”: Pierre Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock (Knopf, 1968), p. 71.

  “false discoveries”: Ibid., p. 244.

  “schematic, arbitrary”: Ibid., p. 250.

  “to enclose classic”: Ibid., pp. 255–56.

  “more virulent”: Ibid., p. 264.

  “The Schoenberg ‘case’”: Ibid., pp. 268–76.

  “develop timbres”: NSPHM, p. 169.

  Seeger and Cowell: Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources (Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 98–108 and 83. 364 Structures 1a: For the classic analysis, see Györgi Ligeti, “Pierre Boulez: Decision and Automatism in Structures 1a,” trans. Leo Black, Die Reihe 4 (Presser, 1960), pp. 36–62. The duration series at the opening are RI(5) and R(12).

  “They represented”: James Miller, “Michel Foucault: The Heart Laid Bare,” Grand Street 39 (1991), p. 60.

  “I am going toward violence”: Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (Penguin, 1976), p. 144.

  “inclusive rather than exclusive”: JCS, p. 13.

  Cage and Schoenberg: For an account of Cage’s studies with Schoenberg, the extent of which is sometimes exaggerated, see Michael Hicks, “John Cage’s Studies with Schoenberg,” American Music 8:2 (1990), pp. 125–40. See also David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life (Arcade, 1992), pp. 47–49.

  “phonograph concert”: See Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (University of California Press, 2004), pp. 99–113.

  “I believe that the use”: JCS, pp. 3–4.

  “stupefied by its activism”: For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles, trans. Richard Gardner, Tom Gora, and John Cage (Boyars, 1995), p. 180.

  “interchangeability of sound”: James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 71.

  Black Mountain: Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (Dutton, 1972), pp. 348–62.

  “Music is lagging”: Quoted in Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999), p. 168.

  five Études of Noises: Pierre Schaeffer, À la Recherche d’une musique concrète (Seuil, 1952), pp. 18–23. For Schaeffer under the German occupation, see Peter Manning, Electronic and Computer Music (Oxford UP, 2004), p. 20. 369 Williams Mix: See Larry Austin, “John Cage’s Williams Mix (1951–3),” in A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches, ed. Patricia Hall and Friedemann Sallis (Cambridge UP, 2004), pp. 189–213.

  “We have no music”: JCS, p. 126.

  “performing monkey,” “fascist tendencies”: The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Robert Samuels (Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 23.

  “Nicolas de Staël”: Pierre-Michel Menger, Le Paradoxe du musicien: Le compositeur, le mélomane, et l’État dans la société contemporaine (Flammarion, 1983), p. 223. For Cocteau in a cape, see Dominique Jameux, Pierre Boulez, trans. Susan Bradshaw (Faber, 1991), p. 67.

  “hyperactive chic”: MFS, p. 226.

  “compulsion neurosis”: See Ligeti, “Pierre Boulez”; and Ligeti, “Metamorphoses of Musical Form,” in Die Reihe 7 (Presser, 1965), p. 10.

  “My intention”: From Cage’s notes to The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage, May 15, 1958 (Wergo 6247-2).

  “Any attempt”: JCS, p. 62.

  “We are producing”: Virgil Thomson, Music Reviewed, 1940–1954 (Vintage, 1967), p. 170.

  “the main premises”: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Blackwell, 2003), p. 579.

  “the greatest American…too busy”: “Copland’s Third,” Time, Oct. 28, 1946, p. 55.

  “Nothing can persuade”: HPAC, p. 411.

  “the speeches of Henry Wallace”: Elizabeth Crist, Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland During the Depression and War (Oxford UP, 2005), p. 193.

  “new international style”: Thomson, Music Reviewed, p. 183.

  “were rebuked”: HPAC, p. 283.

  Broadwood Hotel: New York Herald Tribune, March 25, 1949.

  “SHOSTAKOVICH, WE UNDER STAND”: New York Herald Tribune, March 27, 1949.

  “SHOSTAKOVICH! JUMP”: “Red Visitors Cause Rumpus,” Life, April 4, 1949.

  “It’s hot in here”: Peter W. Goodman, Morton Gould: American Salute (Amadeus, 2000), p. 196.

  Wallace rally: “Tumult at the Waldorf,” Time, April 4, 1949, p. 23. For Copland’s seating, see Aaron Copland and Vivien Perlis, Copland Since 1943 (St. Martin’s, 1989), p. 183.

  Hoover and Nabokov: Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (Free Press, 1989), pp. 43–44, says that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI evidently had files on the composer’s “bohemian private life.”

  Office of Policy Coordination: Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New Press, 1999), pp. 45–56.

  wad of cash: Saunders, Cultural Cold War, pp. 47 and 54–55.

  “His beginnings were promising”: “Shostakovich Hits Stravinsky As ‘Betrayer,’” New York Herald Tribune, March 28, 1949, and “Shostakovich Bids All Artists Lead War on ‘New Fascists,’” New York Times, March 28, 1949.

  “I am going to start”: ACR, pp. 128–29.

  “The present policies”: “Shostakovich Bids All Artists.”

  “culture generalissimo”: SSC2, p. 365.

  “naively stupid”: Ibid., p. 376.

  “absolute and immediate”: Nicolas Nabokov, “The Case of Dmitri Shostakovich,” Harper’s, March 1943, p. 423.

  “Throughout the tumultuous”: Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, expanded ed. (Hamish Hamilton, 1951), p. 204.

  “I fully agree”: Nicolas Nabokov, Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (Atheneum, 1975), pp. 237–38.

  “God knows what”: Arthur Miller, Timebends (Grove, 1987), p. 239.

  “slipped quietly”: “Bartok’s Modern Music Soothes Shostakovich,” New York Times, March 29, 1949.

  “standout fellow traveler”: “Red Visitors Cause Rumpus.”

  “strange rogues’ gallery”: Thomas Mann, Tagebücher, 1949–1950, ed. Inge Jens (Fischer, 1991), pp. 45 and 657.

  “ferreting out”: Copland to Irving Fine and Verna Fine, June 6, 1949, ACLC.

  “Maisoui”: “European Diary,” 1949, ACLC.

  “stuck it out”: Ned Rorem, Knowing When to Stop (Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 283. In Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary (Limelight, 1984), p. 168, Rorem repeats the anecdote of Boulez playing the Second Sonata at his apartment, adding that the music caused Shirley Gabis (now Shirley Perle) to throw up. In a conversation with the author on May 17, 2004, Perle vigorously denied throwing up, although she may have wanted to.

  “You cannot change”: Schoenberg’s attack was printed in Thomson’s Sunday column in the New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 11, 1949. Copland’s protest appeared in the Herald Tribune on Sept. 25.

  “Alias: Aaron Copeland”: Copland’s FBI file was released in May 2003 under the Freedom of Information Act. The Hoover memo is dated July 13, 1951.

  “Copland has been abroad”: Hoover to director of CIA, ibid., p. 10.

  “is no longer writing”: Aaron Copland, Music and Imagination (Harvard UP, 1952), p. 75.

  Evarts’s fate: Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in Germany from Zero Hour to Reunification (University of California Press, 2006), p. 31.

  Busbey read: Congressional Record, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., app. A169. See also Congressional Record, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., July 30 and 31, 1953, pp. 2793, 3609, 3680.

  “I say unequivocally”: “Statement of Aaron Copland,” box 427, House Un-American Activities, ACLC.


  “YOU ARE HEREBY”: The telegram can be found in ACLC. The date was subsequently changed to May 26.

  “My impression”: “Impressions (May 27, 1953) of the Hearing Before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations,” ACLC. For Copland’s claims in his testimony, see Executive Sessions of the Senate, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, Congressional Record, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., pp. 1288 and 1283. The one-dollar check can be found in Copland’s personal file on the Un-American Committee experience.

  “one of America’s”: Martin Merson, “My Education in Government,” Reporter, Oct. 7, 1954. Clipping in ACLC.

  Pollack declares: HPAC, pp. 446–47.

  fee from Rodgers: HPAC, p. 470.

  CBS audience: Edgar Young, Lincoln Center, the Building of an Institution (NYU Press, 1980), p. 170.

  “Oh, Mr. Copland”: Copland and Perlis, Copland Since 1943, p. 136.

  Copland’s decline: HPAC, pp. 409–10.

  “It was exactly”: Ibid., p. 516.

  “serious composer”: Goodman, Morton Gould, p. 210.

  multiple reports: SSC2, p. 347.

  “It seems that once”: Ibid.

  read with annoyance: RCSC, p. 42.

  “a Mozart”: Peyser, Boulez, p. 66.

  “worn out invention”: SWS2, p. 271.

  “What ugliness!”: Boulez-Cage Correspondence, p. 118.

  Craft and Stravinsky: Craft produced six books of “conversations” with Stravinsky. Charles Joseph, who has studied differences between the raw material of these volumes and the finished product, concludes, as many always suspected, that the books are an erratic mix of Stravinsky’s own voice and Craft’s approximation of it. See Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out (Yale UP, 2001), p. 262: “The charges [that Craft scripted Stravinsky] are frequently unsubstantiated or exaggerated, yet in other places justified.” I have chosen to rely mostly on Craft’s diaries and firsthand recollections.

  Schoenberg’s death mask: RCSC, p. 54. 385 “three times!”: Ibid., pp. 66–67.

  “For a moment”: Ibid., pp. 72–73.

  “To-Morrow Shall Be”: Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 422.

  “a hermetic cult”: Nicolas Nabokov, “The Atonal Trail: A Communication,” Partisan Review, May 1948, p. 581.

  “the liberty to experiment”: Nicolas Nabokov, “Introduction à l’oeuvre du XXe siècle,” La Revue musicale 212 (April 1952), p. 8. For the funding, see Saunders, Cultural Cold War, pp. 125–28.

  “Comrade Picasso”: SSC2, p. 381.

  youths walk out: RCSC, p. 82.

  Stravinsky at Structures 1a: RCSC, p. 77; Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 1–3.

  “folklore of mediocrity”: Saunders, Cultural Cold War, p. 224.

  “Eventually…”: Pierre Boulez, “Éventuellement…,” La Revue musicale 212 (April 1952), p. 119: “Que conclure?L’inattendu: affirmons, à notre tour, que tout musicien qui n’a pas ressenti—nous ne disons pas compris, mais bien ressenti—la nécessité du langage dodécaphonique est INUTILE.” Compare Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Harvard UP, 1970), p. 98: “Le bon artisan, dans ces époques bénies, ne songe lui-même qu’à atteindre le beau à travers les catégories de l’ utile.” There would appear to be other references to the Poetics in the first section of Boulez’s essay.

  he dutifully noted: Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out, p. 251.

  Shreffler has assembled: See Anne C. Shreffler, “Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Harvard UP, 2005), p. 229. Information about Movements comes from Shreffler’s communication to the author, with reference to Nabokov’s letter to Stravinsky of March 11, 1958. Shreffler does not believe that Karl Weber, the industrialist in question, was a “front.” 388 Boulez meets Stravinsky: Virgil Thomson, Virgil Thomson (Dutton, 1985), pp. 402–3. For Stravinsky reading Boulez’s essay, see SSC2, p. 348. For the Tropicana, see ibid., p. 350. For Stravinsky’s visit to the garret, see RCSC, p. 167.

  “unforgivable condescension”: Martin Bernheimer, “Igor Stravinsky Has Another Tiff with the Times,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1970.

  “like so many changes”: Stephen Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky (Clarendon, 1988), p. 233.

  “a ballet which would seem”: SSC1, p. 287.

  François de Lauze: Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention (Yale UP, 2002), pp. 228–30.

  the devil: Ibid., pp. 233–34.

  “Someone has said”: SWS2, p. 440.

  octatonic scale: See RTS2, p. 1674.

  “He wanted”: SWS1, p. 53.

  autographs: For Sinatra, see Stravinsky and Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 476; for the Pope, see RSC, p. 280.

  Schaeffer noted: Schaeffer, À la Recherche d’une musique concrète, p. 198.

  Sonatine, Scherzo, Concertino: These titles belong, respectively, to works by Teuscher, Françaix, Jarnach, Roussel, Maderna, Maderna again, Herbert Brün, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Boulez, Nilsson, Heiss (and Zimmermann), Hambraeus, Pousseur, Nilsson again, and Mayuzumi. See “Neue Musik in Darmstadt, 1946–1958,” in Darmstädter Beiträge zur neuen Musik (1959), pp. 75–94. 392 “Schoenberg’s great achievement”: Anders Beyer, The Voice of Music: Conversations with Composers of Our Time, ed. and trans. Jean Christensen and Anders Beyer (Ashgate, 2000), p. 178.

  “Everything had to be stylized”: Hans Werner Henze, Music and Politics: Collected Writings, 1953–81, trans. Peter Labanyi (Faber, 1982), pp. 40–41.

  “my dear”: Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton UP, 1999), p. 140. 393 Nocturnes and Arias: Ibid., p. 146.

  He described himself: These terms can be found at the composer’s website, www.stockhausen.org.

  Glenn Miller’s band: Robin Maconie, Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Scarecrow, 2005), pp. 18–19.

  “This music sounds”: Robin Maconie, The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Clarendon, 1990), pp. 51–53.

  “showers of impulses”: Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Music and Speech,” Die Reihe 6 (Presser, 1964), p. 59.

  “composed the text”: Stockhausen, “Music and Speech,” p. 48.

  gas cloud: For more, see James Harley, Xenakis: His Life in Music (Routledge, 2004), pp. 10–18.

  “The listener must be gripped”: Notes to 40 Jahre Donaueschinger Musiktage, 1950–1990 (col legno AU-031800), p. 130.

  “the perfect rhythm”: Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (Pendragon, 1992), p. 9. See also Nouritza Matossian, Xenakis (Kahn and Averill, 1986), p. 58, where similar images are used and the connection to the anti-Nazi demonstration is made explicit.

  “Their freedom”: Luigi Nono, “Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute,” Darmstädter Beiträge zur neuen Musik (1960), p. 47.

  “indiscipline”: Lev Koblyakov, Pierre Boulez: A World of Harmony (Harwood, 1990), p. 117.

  “Total but Totalitarian”: Peyser, Boulez, p. 102.

  “I’ve often found”: Wolfgang Fink’s interview with Boulez, in the liner notes to Pli selon pli (DG 289 471-2).

  “New Frontier for American art”: John F. Kennedy to Theodate Johnson, Sept. 13, 1960, Musical America, Oct. 1960, p. 11.

  “The only music he likes”: Donna M. Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–1980 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 49.

  composers at White House: Harold C. Schonberg, “Casals Plays at White House; Last Appeared There in 1904,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1961.

  “Nice kids”: RCSC, p. 285.

  “Everyone started writing”: Rorem, Knowing When to Stop, p. 283.

  “This is the best”: Ku
rt List, “Music Chronicle: The State of American Music,” Partisan Review, Jan. 1948, p. 90.

  “No art at all”: Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (Routledge, 1984), p. 79.

  “A lie for a lie”: Milton Babbitt, “Battle Cry,” politics, Nov. 1945, p. 346.

  “absolutely different world”: Milton Babbitt, Words About Music, ed. Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 31.

  “abandon resolutely”: Roger Sessions, “Vienna—Vale, Ave,” Modern Music 15:4 (May–June 1938), pp. 207–208.

  “complex, advanced”: Milton Babbitt, “The Revolution in Sound: Electronic Music,” in The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles et al. (Princeton UP, 2003), pp. 74–75.

  trichords: See Andrew Mead, An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt (Princeton UP, 1994), pp. 55–123.

  “I decided for once”: David Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 2nd ed. (Cornell UP, 1998), p. 55.

  Art Tatum: Michael Hall, Leaving Home: A Conducted Tour of Twentieth-Century Music with Simon Rattle (Faber, 1996), p. 70.

  “Thy hand”: Schiff, Music of Elliott Carter, p. 240.

  Piano Concerto in Berlin: Ibid., p. 254.

  “I dare suggest”: Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares If You Listen?,” High Fidelity 8:2 (Feb. 1958), p. 126.

  “We are in”: Leonard Bernstein, “American Musical Comedy,” Oct. 7, 1956, reprinted in The Joy of Music (Simon and Schuster, 1959), p. 179.

  “Don’t forget”: Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein (Doubleday, 1994), p. 102.

  “It is only after fifty”: Leonard Bernstein, Findings (Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 257.

  12: “Grimes! Grimes!”

  “A bleak little place”: E. M. Forster, “George Crabbe: The Poet and the Man,” in Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes, ed. Eric Crozier (John Lane/Bodley Head, 1946), p. 9.

  “I had not a single”: W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1998), pp. 234 and 237.

  childhood home: Beth Britten, My Brother Benjamin (Kensal Press, 1986), illustrations.

  “I believe in roots”: Benjamin Britten, “On Winning the First Aspen Award,” in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs (Da Capo, 1998), p. 122.