The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise Plot Summary

Introduction

In May 1913, the elegant Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris became an unexpected battleground. As Igor Stravinsky's revolutionary ballet "The Rite of Spring" unfolded on stage with its pounding rhythms and dissonant harmonies, the audience erupted into chaos. Shouting matches between supporters and detractors escalated into physical altercations, nearly drowning out the music itself. This infamous "riot" perfectly encapsulated how music in the 20th century would become both a reflection of societal upheaval and a catalyst for cultural transformation. Throughout this turbulent century, composers responded to world wars, totalitarian regimes, technological revolutions, and shifting ideologies not merely as observers but as active participants in shaping cultural consciousness. The story of 20th century music reveals how artistic expression functions during times of extreme social pressure. We'll explore how composers under Nazi and Soviet regimes developed sophisticated techniques of coded resistance, how American experimentalists challenged European dominance, and how the digital revolution democratized musical creation. This journey illuminates the profound relationship between political power and cultural expression, showing how music can simultaneously preserve tradition and drive radical change. For anyone seeking to understand how art responds to historical forces, this exploration offers valuable insights into creativity's resilience even in humanity's darkest hours, and how the sounds we create both reflect and shape our collective experience.

Chapter 1: Imperial Twilight: The Last Echoes of Romanticism (1900-1913)

The dawn of the 20th century found European music at a fascinating crossroads. The Romantic tradition had reached extraordinary heights through the massive orchestral works of composers like Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, yet beneath this apparent continuity, revolutionary forces were gathering strength. In the imperial capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, concert halls still resonated with 19th-century sounds, but the cracks in this musical edifice—like those in the political structures of Europe's aging empires—were becoming increasingly visible. Vienna emerged as the epicenter of this musical transition. In 1906, a remarkable convergence occurred when Richard Strauss conducted his controversial opera "Salome" in Graz, Austria. The audience included an extraordinary gathering of musical luminaries: Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg, and Berg all witnessed this work that pushed traditional harmony to its breaking point. The opera's dissonant harmonies and explicit sexuality shocked audiences, with Strauss later quipping: "Thanks to that damage I was able to build my villa in Garmisch!" This moment exemplified how the comfortable certainties of 19th-century music were giving way to more provocative expressions that reflected the psychological complexities explored by contemporaries like Sigmund Freud. Gustav Mahler embodied the contradictions of this transitional era. His symphonies expanded to unprecedented scale while simultaneously incorporating folk elements, military marches, and moments of intense intimacy. As director of the Vienna Court Opera, Mahler represented the establishment, yet his innovative compositions pointed toward modernism. His famous remark to Sibelius that "the symphony must be like the world—it must embrace everything" captured the late-Romantic ambition to create all-encompassing musical statements. When Mahler died in 1911, many felt that an entire musical era had passed with him. Outside the Germanic world, alternative paths to musical modernism were emerging. In France, Claude Debussy rejected German musical dominance, creating impressionistic works that dissolved traditional harmony through whole-tone scales and exotic influences. His "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" offered a sensuous alternative to Wagnerian intensity. Meanwhile, in Russia, Stravinsky was beginning his collaboration with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, drawing on Russian folk traditions to create works of startling originality that would soon revolutionize rhythm and orchestration. This period also witnessed significant technological and social changes that transformed how music reached audiences. The phonograph began to democratize access to music, while American ragtime crossed the Atlantic, introducing European listeners to new rhythmic possibilities. Concert life was gradually expanding beyond aristocratic patronage to reach middle-class audiences, though musical institutions remained largely conservative. The stage was set for a century in which music would become increasingly diverse, accessible, and reflective of a rapidly changing world. As Europe moved toward the catastrophe of World War I, few could imagine how completely the musical landscape would be transformed in the coming decades. The twilight of Romanticism contained within it the seeds of multiple musical revolutions that would soon explode across the continent, forever changing how composers approached their craft and how listeners experienced music. The imperial twilight was about to give way to a new dawn—one that would prove far more disruptive than anyone could have anticipated.

Chapter 2: Revolutionary Sounds: Atonality and Primitivism (1908-1918)

Between 1908 and 1918, music experienced a revolution as profound as any in its history. Two radically different paths to modernism emerged almost simultaneously: Arnold Schoenberg's break with tonality in Vienna, and Igor Stravinsky's rhythmic innovations in Paris. These parallel revolutions forever altered how composers approached their craft and how listeners experienced music, creating ruptures that would define musical development throughout the century. In Vienna, Schoenberg's journey into atonality began amid personal crisis. In 1908, he discovered his wife Mathilde was having an affair with the painter Richard Gerstl (who later committed suicide). During this emotional turmoil, Schoenberg composed his Second String Quartet, which famously ends with a soprano singing Stefan George's poem containing the line "I feel the air of another planet." This work marked his decisive break with traditional tonality—the system of related keys that had governed Western music for centuries. By 1909, in works like "Five Pieces for Orchestra," Schoenberg was creating music without any tonal center whatsoever, exploring what he called "the emancipation of dissonance." Schoenberg's revolution was intellectual and inward-looking, emerging from the hyper-expressive late Romanticism of his earlier works. "I am conscious of having broken through every restriction of a bygone aesthetic," he declared. His music provoked violent reactions—concerts ended in riots, critics wrote scathing reviews, and even his mentor Mahler found the music bewildering. Yet Schoenberg gathered devoted disciples, particularly Alban Berg and Anton Webern, forming what would later be called the Second Viennese School. Berg's opera "Wozzeck," completed during World War I, would prove that atonality could convey profound human emotion, telling the story of a common soldier's descent into madness. Meanwhile, in Paris, Stravinsky created a different kind of musical earthquake. On May 29, 1913, the premiere of his ballet "The Rite of Spring" at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées caused the most famous scandal in musical history. The ballet's pounding rhythms, dissonant harmonies, and primitive choreography depicting a pagan sacrifice provoked a near-riot. "One literally could not, throughout the whole performance, hear the sound of music," recalled Gertrude Stein. Yet within a year, "The Rite" was being performed to enthusiastic applause as audiences caught up with Stravinsky's innovations. Unlike Schoenberg's cerebral approach, Stravinsky's revolution was physical and visceral. He drew on Russian folk melodies but subjected them to radical rhythmic displacement and layering. His music embodied what would become a second avant-garde in classical composition—one that sought to engage with primal human experiences rather than abstract intellectual constructs. This approach would prove enormously influential for composers seeking alternatives to Germanic musical traditions. World War I accelerated these revolutionary tendencies while adding new dimensions. As empires collapsed and millions died in the trenches, the old cultural certainties seemed increasingly hollow. Composers who served in the military, like Maurice Ravel and Paul Hindemith, returned with perspectives transformed by mechanized warfare. The war's aftermath saw a widespread "return to order" across the arts, with many composers embracing neoclassicism as an antidote to pre-war excesses. Yet the fundamental innovations of Schoenberg and Stravinsky could not be undone—the musical language had been permanently expanded. By 1918, the comfortable certainties of 19th-century music had been shattered. The innovations of this revolutionary decade represented divergent paths that composers would follow throughout the century: one toward increasing abstraction and complexity, the other toward a new engagement with rhythm, folk traditions, and physical expression. As Europe rebuilt from war, these musical revolutions would continue to reverberate, providing the foundation for all subsequent developments in 20th-century composition.

Chapter 3: Music Under Tyranny: Composers Facing Totalitarianism (1933-1945)

The rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1930s transformed music from an aesthetic pursuit into a political battleground. In Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, composers faced unprecedented governmental control over their creative output, forcing them to navigate between artistic integrity and physical survival. This period revealed both music's vulnerability to political manipulation and its potential as a form of coded resistance. When Hitler came to power in January 1933, the Nazi regime quickly established the Reich Music Chamber under Joseph Goebbels to control all aspects of musical life. Jewish musicians were immediately banned from performing, while composers deemed "degenerate"—including Schoenberg, Webern, and Hindemith—saw their works prohibited. The Nazis promoted music that embodied their idealized vision of German identity, elevating composers like Wagner and Bruckner while commissioning new works that celebrated Nazi ideology. Jazz was particularly targeted as "Negro-Jewish" music that threatened racial purity, with swing fans like the "Swing Youth" facing persecution for their musical preferences. In the Soviet Union, Stalin's regime imposed similarly restrictive cultural policies through the doctrine of Socialist Realism. The 1936 denunciation of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" in Pravda—titled "Muddle Instead of Music" and likely written with Stalin's approval—demonstrated how precarious composers' positions had become. The article attacked the work's modernist elements and established that music should be melodic, accessible, and supportive of Soviet values. Composers faced potential imprisonment or execution if their work was deemed "formalist" or insufficiently patriotic. The most sophisticated response to these pressures came from Shostakovich, who developed techniques of musical coding that satisfied authorities while preserving artistic integrity. His Fifth Symphony (1937), written after his denunciation, outwardly conformed to Socialist Realist principles while containing subtle expressions of suffering and resistance that Soviet audiences recognized. When asked about the seemingly triumphant finale, Shostakovich reportedly said: "The rejoicing is forced. As if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing.'" This strategy of "double-coding" became essential for Soviet composers seeking to maintain artistic truth under oppression. Many prominent musicians fled totalitarian control, creating a remarkable diaspora that reshaped global musical culture. Schoenberg, Bartók, Weill, and numerous others settled in the United States, where they influenced American musical education and composition. Those who remained faced difficult choices: adapt to regime demands, withdraw into "inner emigration" by composing apolitical works, or risk their lives through resistance. Richard Strauss's complex relationship with the Nazi regime—initially accepting a position as president of the Reich Music Chamber before falling from favor—exemplified these moral compromises. The Holocaust devastated Jewish musical traditions across Europe and killed countless musicians. In concentration camps, prisoners formed orchestras that were forced to play while others marched to their deaths, creating one of history's most perverse uses of music. Yet even in these horrific conditions, music provided spiritual resistance. Olivier Messiaen composed his transcendent "Quartet for the End of Time" while imprisoned in a German POW camp, creating spiritual music under the most dehumanizing circumstances. When World War II ended in 1945, the musical world had to confront difficult questions about art's relationship to politics and the moral responsibilities of artists under oppression. The era demonstrated how music could be weaponized for propaganda purposes while simultaneously serving as a vehicle for coded resistance. These experiences would profoundly influence postwar musical developments, particularly in how composers conceptualized the relationship between music, politics, and personal expression.

Chapter 4: Cold War Avant-Garde: Serialism and Experimental Freedom (1945-1970)

The aftermath of World War II created a radically transformed musical landscape. Europe lay in ruins, with concert halls destroyed and musical institutions compromised by their associations with fascist regimes. Into this vacuum stepped the victorious superpowers, each promoting their preferred musical aesthetics as extensions of their ideological systems. Music became another battlefield in the Cold War, with styles and techniques taking on political dimensions that transcended purely artistic considerations. In Western Europe, particularly Germany, a new musical avant-garde emerged that explicitly rejected the nationalist traditions that had been co-opted by fascism. The Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, established in 1946 with American occupation support, became the epicenter of this movement. Young composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Luigi Nono developed "total serialism," extending Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique to control every aspect of composition—rhythm, dynamics, and timbre. Boulez's polemical 1952 essay "Schoenberg is Dead" exemplified the radical spirit of this generation, which sought to create a tabula rasa for music, free from historical contamination. Meanwhile, American experimental composers charted different paths. John Cage introduced chance operations and indeterminacy, allowing random processes to shape musical outcomes. His infamous piece "4'33"" (1952), in which a performer sits silently at a piano, challenged fundamental assumptions about music itself. As Cage explained: "I have nothing to say and I am saying it." This approach represented a complete abdication of the composer's traditional control—a deliberate rejection of the authoritarian impulses that had dominated mid-century politics. On the West Coast, composers like Harry Partch rejected European traditions entirely, creating new instruments and tuning systems. The Soviet bloc enforced its own musical orthodoxy. Composers were expected to write accessible, folk-influenced music that glorified socialist achievements. When Andrei Zhdanov issued his cultural decrees in 1948, Soviet composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev were forced to publicly repent for "formalist" tendencies. However, after Stalin's death in 1953, restrictions gradually loosened, allowing composers like Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina to develop more experimental approaches, though still under significant constraints. Electronic music emerged as a revolutionary force during this period. Studios established in Paris, Cologne, Milan, and New York explored the possibilities of tape manipulation, electronic sound generation, and computer music. Stockhausen's "Gesang der Jünglinge" (1955-56) combined electronic sounds with a processed recording of a boy's voice, creating a new synthesis of human and machine elements. These technological innovations paralleled developments in popular music, where electronic instruments were transforming rock and jazz, gradually eroding boundaries between musical categories. The Cold War context profoundly shaped how these innovations were received and supported. The CIA secretly funded performances of American avant-garde music in Europe through organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, seeing experimental art as evidence of Western creative freedom compared to Soviet restrictions. This created the paradoxical situation where highly abstract, audience-challenging music received institutional support partly for propaganda purposes. As musicologist Richard Taruskin observed: "The purpose of official American support for difficult, uncompromising art was to win a propaganda victory over the Soviet Union." By the late 1960s, the dogmatic certainties of the post-war avant-garde were breaking down. Younger composers rebelled against serialism's complexity and electronic music's abstraction, seeking more direct communication with audiences. The political upheavals of 1968 further challenged established hierarchies in musical institutions. As the period closed, the Cold War's binary musical world was giving way to a more pluralistic landscape where multiple approaches could coexist, setting the stage for the postmodern era to come.

Chapter 5: Global Transformations: From Cultural Divides to Digital Fusion (1970-2000)

The final decades of the 20th century witnessed a dramatic reconfiguration of musical boundaries as the rigid ideological divisions of the early Cold War gave way to more fluid cultural exchanges. This transformation reflected broader geopolitical shifts, technological innovations, and changing social attitudes that collectively reshaped how music was created, distributed, and understood across the globe. Minimalism emerged as a powerful counter-current to the complexities of serialism. Composers like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley created works based on gradually evolving repetitive patterns, often influenced by non-Western musical practices. Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" (1974-76) combined the rhythmic vitality of West African drumming with Western harmonic progressions, creating hypnotic textures that appealed to audiences beyond traditional classical music circles. Glass's opera "Einstein on the Beach" (1976) achieved unprecedented popularity for a contemporary work, attracting audiences from both classical and popular music backgrounds. This accessibility represented a deliberate rejection of academic complexity in favor of direct communication. The collapse of Soviet communism transformed musical life in Eastern Europe and Russia. Composers who had worked under repressive conditions suddenly gained access to Western techniques and markets. Arvo Pärt's meditative "holy minimalism," developed in Soviet Estonia, found a global audience through recordings on the ECM label. His "tintinnabuli" style, first revealed in works like "Tabula Rasa" (1977), combined medieval influences with modern sensibilities to create music of remarkable spiritual power. In post-Soviet Russia, Alfred Schnittke's polystylistic approach—juxtaposing baroque, classical, romantic, and avant-garde elements within single works—epitomized the postmodern condition. Non-Western musical traditions gained unprecedented prominence in global composition. Influenced by his studies of Balinese gamelan music, American composer Lou Harrison created works that genuinely synthesized Eastern and Western elements rather than merely appropriating exotic sounds. Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu similarly navigated between Western modernism and traditional Japanese aesthetics, creating a distinctive voice in works like "November Steps" (1967) for shakuhachi, biwa, and orchestra. As Takemitsu explained: "I am searching for a sound that has the power to make people rediscover what they have forgotten or ignored." Technology continued to transform musical possibilities. The development of digital sampling, MIDI interfaces, and affordable synthesizers democratized electronic music production. The personal computer revolution allowed composers to design interactive systems where musical outcomes depended on performer choices or algorithmic processes. As composer Roger Reynolds observed: "The computer doesn't just change how we make music; it changes how we think about what music is." The rise of the internet in the 1990s began to transform how music was shared and consumed, foreshadowing the digital revolution that would reshape the industry in the twenty-first century. By the century's end, the concept of a single dominant musical narrative had collapsed. The rigid modernist belief in historical progress toward ever-greater abstraction gave way to a pluralistic landscape where multiple approaches coexisted. Composers freely drew from diverse traditions, creating personal syntheses rather than following prescribed ideological paths. This shift mirrored broader cultural trends toward globalization and postmodernism. As barriers between "high" and "low" culture eroded, composers increasingly incorporated elements from popular music, jazz, and folk traditions into their work. This period of transformation demonstrated how musical evolution reflects broader historical currents. The breakdown of cultural divides paralleled political changes like the end of the Cold War and accelerating globalization. Music became both a reflection of these changes and a laboratory for imagining new forms of cultural exchange beyond ideological constraints. The digital revolution that closed the century would only accelerate these tendencies, creating unprecedented opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration while raising new questions about authenticity, ownership, and the future of musical creation.

Summary

Throughout the tumultuous 20th century, music served as both a mirror reflecting societal upheaval and a laboratory for experimenting with new forms of expression. The central tension that emerges across this period is between tradition and innovation—between composers who sought to preserve and extend established musical languages and those who embraced radical new sounds, technologies, and cultural influences. This tension manifested differently across national boundaries and political systems, with music often becoming a battleground for competing ideologies. From Schoenberg's break with tonality to the electronic experiments of Stockhausen, from Shostakovich's coded resistance under Stalin to the minimalist revolution of Glass and Reich, composers responded directly to the unprecedented historical forces of their era—industrialization, world wars, totalitarianism, the Cold War, and finally globalization. The story of 20th-century music offers valuable lessons for understanding cultural evolution in times of rapid change. First, innovation often emerges from cultural intersections rather than from isolated genius—the most vital developments came when classical traditions encountered jazz, folk music, or non-Western practices. Second, artistic revolutions frequently anticipate or parallel political ones—the radical experiments of Stravinsky and Schoenberg preceded the collapse of European empires, while Weimar Germany's musical experimentation flourished alongside its democratic opening. Finally, the most enduring works often emerged from composers who balanced innovation with accessibility, creating music that could speak to both specialized audiences and broader publics. As we navigate our own era of technological disruption and social transformation, these musical pioneers remind us that art can help societies process change, preserve cultural memory, and imagine new possibilities even in the most challenging times.

About Author

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Alex Ross

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. From 1992 to 1996 he wrote for the New York Times. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was published in 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and became a national bestseller. It won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Royal Philharmonic Society Creative Communication Award; appeared on the New York Times's list of the ten best books of year; and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the Samuel Johnson prizes. Ross has received a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center, fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the Banff Centre, three ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, and an honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music. He has also served as a McGraw Professor in Writing at Princeton University. In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. His next book, an essay collection titled Listen to This, will appear in fall 2010. A native of Washington, DC, Ross now lives in Manhattan. In 2005 he married the actor and filmmaker Jonathan Lisecki.

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