The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  “The dark warm flood”: The Poetical Works of George Crabbe (Oxford UP, 1932), p. 198.

  “gift and personality”: Britten, “On Winning the First Aspen Award,” p. 118.

  Nono refused to shake: John Amis, Amiscellany: My Life, My Music (Faber, 1986), p. 199.

  Tippett: For one of Michael Tippett’s commentaries on his sexuality, see his memoir, Those Twentieth Century Blues (Hutchinson, 1991), p. 52.

  “Is he musical?”: Philip Brett, “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (Routledge, 1994), p. 11. 414 The Love Songs of Hafiz: See Stephen Downes, Szymanowski, Eroticism, and the Voices of Mythology (Ashgate, 2003); and Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature (NYU Press, 1997).

  glass of whiskey: Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (Faber, 1992), pp. 3–4.

  “the fourth B”: DMBB1, p. 12.

  harmonize before he could spell: Imogen Holst, Britten (Crowell, 1965), p. 19.

  Victor Hugo setting: David Matthews, Britten (Haus, 2003), p. 10.

  School Boy’s Diary: John Bridcut, Britten’s Children (Faber, 2006), pp. 1–8.

  BBC: For more on the early history of the BBC’s modern-music programming, see Humphrey Carpenter, The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1945–1996 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996); and Jennifer Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes (Cambridge UP, 1999).

  Schoenberg soiree: DMBB1, pp. 127–28. 416 Wozzeck on radio: Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 51.

  study with Berg: DMBB1, p. 395; Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 52. It seems possible that Britten’s parents thought that Berg was homosexual and would corrupt their son; see DMBB1, p. 506.

  “Stand up and fold”: The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (Faber, 1977), pp. 160–61.

  literary taste: See Paul Kildea, “Britten, Auden, and ‘Otherness,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 38–39.

  enharmonic change: Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 16.

  Snape: DMBB1, pp. 495–96.

  “thin-as-a-board juveniles”: Ibid., pp. 1015–16.

  “waspishness, bitterness”: Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 501.

  “corpses”: Ibid., p. 243.

  Britten traveled to America: On the decision to leave, see DMBB1, pp. 619 and 634.

  “Holywood”: Ibid., p. 610.

  Milestone: Ibid. and DMBB2, pp. 692–95.

  “It would be nice”: DMBB1, p. 567.

  7 Middagh: Paul Bowles, Without Stopping (Ecco, 1985), pp. 233–35.

  “Everything here”: DMBB2, p. 794.

  Violin Concerto and Spanish Civil War: Matthews, Britten, p. 52.

  “He’d now the power”: Poetical Works of George Crabbe, p. 197.

  “accidental murder”: Peter Grimes materials, Britten-Pears Library, Aldeburgh. See Draft Scenario (Brett’s L5), Johnson Line notes (L6), and Pears’s list of scenes (L7).

  “Once we’d decided”: Philip Brett, “‘Peter Grimes’: The Growth of the Libretto,” in The Making of “Peter Grimes”: Notes and Commentaries, ed. Paul Banks (Boydell, 2000), p. 67.

  “The queerness”: DMBB2, p. 1189.

  “You will soon forget”: Peter Grimes materials, Britten-Pears Library.

  “dramatic portrayal”: Philip Brett, “‘Peter Grimes’: The Growth of the Libretto,” p. 73; Philip Brett, “Salvation at Sea: Billy Budd,” in The Britten Companion, ed. Christopher Palmer (Faber, 1984), p. 136.

  “The more vicious”: “Opera’s New Face,” Time, Feb. 16, 1948, p. 63.

  “Why did you do this?”: For more on Britten’s use of conversational rhythms, see Philip Rupprecht, Britten’s Musical Language (Cambridge UP, 2001). 425 Porgy and Bess: DMBB2, pp. 637–38.

  Passacaglia’s programmatic indications: Banks, Making of Peter Grimes, p. 205.

  “Sadler’s Wells!”: DMBB2, p. 1264.

  “not a bore”: Thomson’s review of Feb. 13, 1948, reprinted in DMBB3, p. 378.

  Scotland Yard interview: Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 335.

  FBI file: Donald Mitchell, “Violent Climates,” in Cooke, Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, pp. 211–16.

  homosexuality and Billy Budd: The erotic implications of the scenario had already been noticed by the critic F. O. Matthiessen, who in 1941 took note of Claggart’s “soft yearning” for Billy and the “sexual element in Claggart’s malevolence.” See Matthiessen, The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford UP, 1941), pp. 506–7. Matthiessen, incidentally, committed suicide in 1950, just as Britten was starting work on Billy Budd.

  interview chords: For a discussion of their erotic implications, see Clifford Hindley, “Eros in Life and Death in Billy Budd and Death in Venice,” in Cooke, Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, pp. 151–53.

  David Hemmings: Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 357.

  Harry Morris: Bridcut, Britten’s Children, pp. 46–53. The two authors who have studied Britten’s relationships with boys come to different conclusions. Humphrey Carpenter portrays a would-be pedophile who plies boys with martinis and encourages them to swim nude in his swimming pool (Benjamin Britten, pp. 350–58). Bridcut tells the same stories but puts them in a less sinister light, concluding that “whatever shadows may have lurked in Britten’s mind, his effect on these boys was benign, wholesome, and inspiring” (Britten’s Children, p. xii). The truth is probably somewhere in between, or unknowable. 435 A Child of Our Time: For more, see Kenneth Gloag, Tippett, “A Child of Our Time” (Cambridge UP, 1999).

  Shostakovich and Britten meeting: LFS, p. 219.

  “great works of the human spirit”: IGSF, p. 114.

  “You great composer”: Michael Oliver, Benjamin Britten (Phaidon, 1996), p. 170.

  “They’ve been pursuing me”: IGSF, pp. 91–92.

  “I am scared”: EWS, p. 377.

  “Our disappointment”: Ibid., p. 348.

  “The title page”: IGSF, p. 91.

  “a chain of metamorphoses”: Lyudmila Kovnatskaya, “Shostakovich and Britten: Some Parallels,” in Shostakovich in Context, ed. Rosamund Bartlett (Oxford UP, 2000), p. 187.

  “peculiar glow”: “Editor’s Note,” Symphonies nos. 14 and 15 (State Publishers “Music,” 1980).

  “gloomy, introverted”: EWS, p. 305.

  “I didn’t”: Ibid., p. 470.

  “Now has struck”: IGSF, pp. 165 and 306–7.

  Donald Mitchell speculated: See his notes to Britten’s live recording of Symphony No. 14 and his own Nocturne (BBC 8013-2).

  Lou Gehrig’s disease: EWS, pp. 441–42.

  “very tense”: Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 541.

  Wl/adysl/aw Moes: “‘I Was Thomas Mann’s Tadzio,’” in Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, ed. Donald Mitchell (Cambridge UP, 1987), pp. 184–85.

  Mann’s unfinished works: Donald Prater, Thomas Mann: A Life (Oxford UP, 1995), p. 88.

  “He talked quite calmly”: Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 543.

  “Ben is writing”: Ibid., p. 546.

  gamelan scale: Mervyn Cooke, “Britten and the Gamelan,” in Mitchell, Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, pp. 122–23. See also Mervyn Cooke, Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten (Boydell, 1998); and Mervyn Cooke, “Distant Horizons: From Pagodaland to the Church Parables,” in Cooke, Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, pp. 167–87.

  known from McPhee: Cooke, Britten and the Far East, pp. 27–28.

  “it was as if”: Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. David Luke (Bantam, 1988), p. 263.

  Alexander Dunkel: Author’s interview, July 19, 2004.

  “I was so taken aback”: IGSF, p. 193.

  salute at Met:
David J. Baker, “‘It Vas Premiere: The Night Shostakovich Came to the Met,” Opera News, Dec. 10, 1994, p. 17.

  Viola Sonata: EWS, pp. 528–32; LFS, p. 286.

  “I want to say”: DMBB2, p. 1154.

  13. Zion Park

  “I have found”: Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Fischer, 1971), p. 477.

  “Adrian Leverkühn might”: Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889–1955, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (Knopf, 1971), pp. 549–50. Golo Mann once wrote to Britten: “My father, incidentally, used to say, that if it ever came to some musical illustration of his novel, Doctor Faustus, you would be the composer to do it.” See Patrick Carnegy, “The Novella Transformed: Thomas Mann as Opera,” in Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, ed. Donald Mitchell (Cambridge UP, 1987), p. 168. Britten and Leverkühn both set William Blake’s “The Sick Rose” and Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne”; both had a taste for archaic folk poetry and medieval subjects; both composed a Shakespeare comedy. Doctor Faustus can be seen on the shelves of the library of the Red House in Aldeburgh, but, according to Donald Mitchell, Britten probably never read it.

  “black masterpieces”: “Entretien avec Claude Samuel,” booklet included with the 1988 Erato box-set recording of Messiaen’s works (ECD 75505), p. 16.

  Pousseur: Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: The Avant Garde Since 1945 (Braziller, 1981), p. 258. There are also references to the fictional composer in Henze’s Third Violin Concerto; Peter Maxwell Davies’s Resurrection (see John Warnaby, “Peter Maxwell Davies’s Recent Music, and Its Debt to His Earlier Scores,” in Perspectives on Peter Maxwell Davies, ed. Ris; Bengt Hambraeus’s hard McGregor [Ashgate, 2000], pp. 76–77; and notes to recording of Resurrection [Collins Classics 70342]); Poul Ruders’s Corpus cum figurc>Apocalipsis cum figuris secundum Dürer; and Alfred Schnittke’s Historia von D. Johann Fausten, among others.

  “the century of death”: Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Harvard UP, 1976), p. 313.

  “Grand Hotel Abyss”: Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (MIT Press, 1971), p. 22.

  Resurrection as Hiroshima: NSPHM, p. 337.

  playing Messiah: Ibid., p. 333.

  “Visited Messiaen”: “European Diary,” 1949, ACLC.

  communal bathroom: NSPHM, p. 340.

  Esa-Pekka Salonen: Author’s interview, March 25, 2003.

  Kent Nagano: Author’s interview, Oct. 8, 2002.

  “The tonic triad, the dominant”: Claude Samuel, Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color, trans. E. Thomas Glasow (Amadeus, 1986), pp. 51–52.

  “remote overtones”: Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (University of California Press, 1983), p. 318.

  “the chord of resonance”: Olivier Messiaen, The Technique of My Musical Language, trans. John Satterfield (Leduc, 1956), p. 50 and ex. 208.

  Messiaen’s modes generate: See Paul Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (Cornell UP, 1985), pp. 38–39. See also Messiaen, Technique of My Musical Language, ex. 366.

  “rainbows of chords”: Antoine Goléa, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Julliard, 1960), p. 30. 449 Fêtes des belles eaux: See Nigel Simeone, Olivier Messiaen: A Bibliographical Catalogue of Messiaen’s Works (Schneider, 1998), pp. 192 and 194.

  “ever splashier paroxysms”: Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time, p. 110.

  “an angel wearing lipstick”: NSPHM, p. 151.

  “to open up”: Virgil Thomson, Music Reviewed, 1940–1954 (Vintage, 1967), p. 160.

  “She had to be put”: “Interview with Yvonne Loriod,” in The Messiaen Companion, ed. Peter Hill (Faber, 1995), p. 294.

  “Tristan trilogy”: Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time, p. 124.

  “We are all in a profound”: NSPHM, p. 214.

  “Messiaen is developing”: The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Robert Samuels (Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 126.

  “Birds are my first”: Goléa, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen, pp. 218–19.

  “I’m anxious”: NSPHM, p. 208.

  Johnson has observed: See Robert Sherlaw Johnson, Messiaen (University of California Press, 1975), p. 135.

  Dingle notes: See Christopher Dingle, “‘La statue reste sur son piédestal’: Messiaen’s La Transfiguration and Vatican II,” Tempo 212 (April 2000), pp. 8–11.

  “an immense cake”: Samuel, Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color, p. 160.

  “immense solitude”: Catherine Massip, ed., Portrait(s) d’Olivier Messiaen (Bibliothèque National de France, 1996), pp. 20–21.

  “I am here”: JCS, pp. 109 and 126. “Do you agree”: Ibid., p. 48.

  boxing gloves: David Osmond-Smith, “Bussotti, Sylvano,” in NG 4, p. 678.

  “We cannot”: Paul Attinello, “Imploding the System: Kagel and the Deconstruction of Modernism,” in Postmodern Music, Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (Routledge, 2002), p. 271.

  Berio would criticize: See, for example, his Harvard lectures of 1993–94, collected in Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future (Harvard UP, 2006), esp. p. 21.

  “field composition”: Karlheinz Stockhausen, “…how time passes…,” Die Reihe 3 (Presser, 1959), pp. 32–33.

  propellers vibrating: Robin Maconie, The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Clarendon, 1990), p. 94.

  sonorism: See Adrian Thomas, Polish Music Since Szymanowski (Cambridge UP, 2005), pp. 83–109.

  “Composers often”: Charles Bodman Rae, The Music of Lutosl /awski, 3rd ed. (Omnibus, 1999), p. 75.

  “I could start”: Bernard Jacobson, A Polish Renaissance (Phaidon, 1996), p. 92.

  from a great height: Ibid., p. 99.

  “Play a vibration”: Jonathan Harvey, The Music of Stockhausen (University of California Press, 1975), p. 113.

  an incendiary essay: Cornelius Cardew, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (ubuclassics, 2004), pp. 47–75.

  “an intellectualist”: TMDF, p. 253. Other quotations are on pp. 256–57 and 395.

  “metacollage”: Jonathan Cott, Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer (Picador, 1974), p. 174.

  in search of drinks: Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (Faber, 1992), pp. 482–83.

  “witch hunts”: Bernd Alois Zimmermann: “Du und Ich und Ich und die Welt”: Dokumente aus den Jahren 1940 bis 1950, ed. Heribert Henrich (Wolke, 1998), p. 72.

  “O Germany”: Ibid., pp. 74–75.

  “Watch with me”: TMDF, p. 516.

  looked askance: “Kompositionstechnik und Inspiration” (1949), in “Du und Ich und Ich und die Welt,” pp. 124–25.

  steadily scrubbing out: Archives of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

  “When you are accepted”: György Ligeti, lecture at the New England Conservatory, March 10, 1993.

  Ligeti’s wartime experiences: Richard Toop, György Ligeti (Phaidon, 1999), pp. 19–22; “Interview with the Composer,” in Paul Griffiths, György Ligeti (Robson Books, 1983), pp. 16–18; Richard Steinitz, György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination (Northeastern UP, 2003), pp. 19–21; György Ligeti, “Träumen Sie in Farbe?”: György Ligeti im Gespräch mit Eckhard Roelcke (Paul Zsolnay, 2003), pp. 46–60.

  Ligeti reads Mann: Wolfgang Burde, György Ligeti: Eine Monographie (Atlantis, 1993), p. 43.

  “a knife in Stalin’s heart”: Steinitz, György Ligeti, p. 57.

  escape from Hungary: Ibid., pp. 70–71.

  Stockhausen broadcast: Griffiths, György Ligeti, p. 22.

  “I don’t like gurus”: Richard Dufallo, Trackings: Composers Speak with Richard Dufallo (Oxford UP, 1989), p. 333.

  “True, there were”: Ligeti, “Träumen Sie in Farbe?” p. 98.

  “event - pause - event”: Ligeti, “Metamorphoses of Musical Form,” in Die Reihe 7 (Presser, 1965), p. 10.

  moves “through all the shades”: TMDF, p. 393.

  “peasant devotion”: Francis Poulenc, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand (Julliard, 1954), p. 109.

  Aquinas wrote
: Vincent P. Benitez, “Simultaneous Contrast and Additive Designs in Olivier Messiaen’s Opera, Saint François d’Assise,” Music Theory Online 8:2 (Aug. 2002), note 45.

  “Certain people are annoyed”: Interview with Jean-Christophe Marti, in notes to Kent Nagano’s recording of Saint François d’Assise (DG 445 176-2).

  refusal to “play God”: Anthony Pople, “Messiaen’s Musical Language: An Introduction,” in Hill, Messiaen Companion, p. 46.

  14. Beethoven Was Wrong

  Sgt. Pepper’s at the Schlosskeller: Richard Toop, György Ligeti (Phaidon, 1999), p. 155.

  “A Day in the Life”: Allan Kozinn, The Beatles (Phaidon, 1995), p. 153; Mark Hertsgaard, A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles (Delacorte, 1995), pp. 7–8; Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles Recording Sessions (Harmony, 1988).

  “Tomorrow Never Knows”: See Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (Pimlico, 1998), p. 169; April 6 and 7, 1966, entries, in Lewisohn, Beatles Recording Sessions; and Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (Little, Brown, 2005), p. 601.

  Grateful Dead and Stockhausen: Derek Beres, Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music (iUniverse, 2005), p. 32.

  Zappa calls Varèse: Frank Zappa, “Edgard Varèse: Idol of My Youth,” Stereo Review 26:6 ( June 1971), pp. 62–63.

  “Listening to Bengt”: Recording of Hambraeus’s Constellations II and Interferences (Limelight 86052).

  “Schoenberg gives”: Edward Strickland, American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music (Indiana UP, 1991), p. 46.

  “a drift away from narrative”: Brian Eno, foreword to Mark Prendergast, The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance—the Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age (Bloomsbury, 2000), p. xi.

  Young and Dolphy: Interview with Young in Strickland, American Composers, pp. 56–57.

  Glass and jazz: Ev Grimes, “Interview: Education,” in Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (University of California Press, 1999), p. 16. 476 “serious musicians”: LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Blues People: Negro Music in White America (Quill, 1999), p. 188.

  Bartók’s chords of fourths: Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 125.