Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

[Artem]

Ha! Hello.

[xochitl]

this is where failed classical activists among hipsters end up 

it's mostly nicer too

but yeah i think ill look into that book. saw it mentioned towards the beginning of the thread too

[pjme]

can anyone recommend other books on 20th-century music worth reading?  ive been going through taruskin's oxford history but havent gotten to the 20th century yet [and wont for a year at least]. is that one pretty good, or should i look at others?

btw im not reading anything by adorno unless somebody gives me a very good reason 

I enjoyed Ingo Metzmacher's "Keine Angst vor neuen Tônen" ( "No fear for new sounds" ?? (2004/2005), which has as subtitle " Personal encounters with 20th century music". Metzmacher describes how he discovered the music of Ives, Messiaen, Cage , Hartmann, Stravinsky,Nono, Schönberg, Varèse, Debussy and Mahler - "wondrous windows of the new".

I don't know if it was translated into English.



P.

[dyn]

Have you read Modern Music and After by Paul Griffiths? I don't know what's the general view of this book, but i think it is worth investigating. It has a usefeul discography section too.

It's apparently somewhat on the dry side (i haven't read it) and isn't intended quite so much as Ross or Taruskin as a story about music, more like a reference work, i think. Still worth investigating though.

personally, i'm hopeful that Tim Rutherford-Johnson will get around to writing the book he's been talking about. >.>

[Superhorn]

  Those who talk about all the forgettable music which has been written and performed in our time should realize that the vast majority
of all  the symphonies, concertos, chmber music, operas , oratorios etc written over the centuries have been deservedly forgotten .
The present day is no different from the past in this respect .
   In the field of opera alone, it's been estimated that since the early 17th century , approximately 40,000 operas have been written
by who knows how many different composers .  How many are performed today ? 
   Of course,  many high quality works  have also fallen into obscurity , but  fortunately  many have gotten more exposure recently,
live nd recorded in recent years .

[Karl Henning]

Still, human performers are collaborators in a sense;  and if the singers feel like utensils, the composer may need to brush up her people skills.

[kishnevi]

The taped electronic part is a component of the music on equal footing with the other acoustic and/or vocal parts.  It is not surprising that the composer would be giving attention to all parts of the work, trying to get the balance right, and getting the parts to gel as she intended.  This can sometimes be a hard process, since amateur musicians/singers might have trouble blending with the electronic parts if they do not have very much experience with this kind of work.

There is now a large body of repertory written for acoustic instruments and electronic sounds (either provided on tape,or more commonly these days supplied via computer, or generated live). 

In fact, it is my favorite kind of composition.

Ah, but that's just it:  she paid us chorus people almost no attention, only a most cursory explanation of what our part in the proceedings would be.  Perhaps I should be more positive, and interpret this as her approval of how Dr. Lemonds was directing us,  but the feeling that we were secondary to the recorders was general. 

This was of course, thirty five years ago, and there's no way of knowing how I would react to the music now.  Although I maintain my bias in favor of unprepared pianos.  (Although of course such instruments are really just pianos prepared in the traditional way, aren't they?)

As I said, I don't even recall the name of the composer.  Perhaps if you lobbed the name of South African female composers active in the late 70s at me,  I might recognize the name.    I do know that I (and all the chorus, university students one and all) had never heard of her before.

[kishnevi]

Karl may be right that her people skills might have needed some tweaking, or it could have been a cultural thing.  In checking my usual sources for living composers, I can only find one female composer from SA, but she has not written anything for chorus and tape, so I doubt it is the same one: Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph  (b. 1948).

Definitely not the same one.  Zaidel-Rudolph was just finishing up her studies at the time I was in college, so she's about fifteen or twenty years too young.

Looking through Wikipedia's list of 20th century composers,  there are no female composers listed from South Africa, so either she's not listed, or listed under a different nationality. 

Now my curiousity is up.  I'll try to drum up a possible name before or after Yom Kippur.

[RJR]

can anyone recommend other books on 20th-century music worth reading?  ive been going through taruskin's oxford history but havent gotten to the 20th century yet [and wont for a year at least]. is that one pretty good, or should i look at others?


btw im not reading anything by adorno unless somebody gives me a very good reason 

H. H. Stuckenschmidt. It's a good introduction to 20th C music.

[The new erato]

H. H. Stuckenschmidt. It's a good introduction to 20th C music.

That actually was my introduction, in 1974.

[North Star]

That actually was my introduction, in 1974.

I assume then that it won't cover the last quarter of the century too well... (or even the last half, really)

[The new erato]

There may have been later editions; what do I know?

[North Star]

There may have been later editions; what do I know?

Looks like there aren't

But there's this, mentioned by xochitl:
[asin]0195384857[/asin]

[Karl Henning]

Thanks, Karlo. I "Looked Inside," and somehow found something to quarrel with immediately. More tomorrow . . . .

[North Star]

Thanks, Karlo. I "Looked Inside," and somehow found something to quarrel with immediately. More tomorrow . . . .

I have read through these, and have electronic versions - not too good imo.

From the 1-star review's comments (my underlining)

Thanks for this review demo. I really do not see a discussion here. The omission of Jazz musicians and Boulez [!?] and Ligeti [?!?!] in a book that is supposed to be a History of late twentieth century music is just inadmissible. One simply can't -reasonably- say it isn't.

Well, I think that makes it pretty clear that this book isn't too good, to put it kindly.

[aquablob]

Yeah, that Richard Taruskin is a real hack. 

[aquablob]

And for the record, both Boulez and Ligeti get ample coverage in Taruskin.

[dyn]

as I recall Taruskin's 20th century history is a very "mainstream" account in spite of his claims to be revisionist or critical or w/e. In the second half of the 20th century he rehashes the standard american-imperialist narrative of Schoenberg vs Stravinsky -> Darmstadt vs Social Realism -> minimalism conquers all with his own spin (i.e. the transition to "postliteracy") in the very last chapter. There's some good stuff in the first half of the 20th century—equal time given to Ives/Crawford/Ruggles/etc, mention of the Futurists, etc, alongside all the tedious chapters with tone row analyses of the same few Schoenberg and Webern pieces that every history book talks about—but all the usual suspects are omitted.

- Not a single mention of Vaughan Williams, for instance. In fact, i think Britten is the only British composer to appear in either volume 4 or 5 (he gets a whole chapter to himself though!) except a bit of Ferneyhough near the end.
- Very little time spent on Puccini, Rachmaninoff*, Feldman, Lachenmann, spectralism, postminimalism, etc (i think some of them got maybe a paragraph at most)—or either any other composer born between ~1870 and ~1930 who wrote non-modernist music (except Shostakovich, so Taruskin can get some digs in at his old academic enemies on the other side of the Testimony fence) or any composer born after ~1930 who wrote modernist music.
- No jazz or pop until the 60s (and only Miles Davis, the Beatles and a couple other bands get mentions)—of course, he claims to only be examining the history of written music, but he talks extensively about electronic music from Varèse to Stockhausen (but not as far as Kraftwerk) and then jumps ahead to John Zorn (who is, apparently, only a classical musician).
- No nonwhites, almost no women.
- No film music (except Korngold, briefly).
- This is the Oxford History of Western Music, but in the 20th century Western music spread all over the globe, yet only a couple of paragraphs about Takemitsu and some name-drops in the last chapter indicate Taruskin's even aware of that.

It all seemed like more of the same sort of thing you get from every music history textbook, just written more journalistically with punchier adjectives.

* edit: I'm misremembering. Rachmaninoff actually got a musical example (as did Medtner) and while Puccini didn't get much he did point out that Puccini's music remains more popular than that of almost every other composer he's going to talk about for the rest of the volume and question whether we were really going about historiography the right way if we penned histories which skip straight from Mahler to Schoenberg. i suppose there are similar concessions elsewhere for composers/movements/other things he doesn't feel like getting into.

[Johnll]

as I recall Taruskin's 20th century history is a very "mainstream" account in spite of his claims to be revisionist or critical or w/e. In the second half of the 20th century he rehashes the standard american-imperialist narrative of Schoenberg vs Stravinsky -> Darmstadt vs Social Realism -> minimalism conquers all with his own spin (i.e. the transition to "postliteracy") in the very last chapter. There's some good stuff in the first half of the 20th century—equal time given to Ives/Crawford/Ruggles/etc, mention of the Futurists, etc, alongside all the tedious chapters with tone row analyses of the same few Schoenberg and Webern pieces that every history book talks about—but all the usual suspects are omitted.

- Not a single mention of Vaughan Williams, for instance. In fact, i think Britten is the only British composer to appear in either volume 4 or 5 (he gets a whole chapter to himself though!) except a bit of Ferneyhough near the end.
- Very little time spent on Puccini, Rachmaninoff*, Feldman, Lachenmann, spectralism, postminimalism, etc (i think some of them got maybe a paragraph at most)—or either any other composer born between ~1870 and ~1930 who wrote non-modernist music (except Shostakovich, so Taruskin can get some digs in at his old academic enemies on the other side of the Testimony fence) or any composer born after ~1930 who wrote modernist music.
- No jazz or pop until the 60s (and only Miles Davis, the Beatles and a couple other bands get mentions)—of course, he claims to only be examining the history of written music, but he talks extensively about electronic music from Varèse to Stockhausen (but not as far as Kraftwerk) and then jumps ahead to John Zorn (who is, apparently, only a classical musician).
- No nonwhites, almost no women.
- No film music (except Korngold, briefly).
- This is the Oxford History of Western Music, but in the 20th century Western music spread all over the globe, yet only a couple of paragraphs about Takemitsu and some name-drops in the last chapter indicate Taruskin's even aware of that.

It all seemed like more of the same sort of thing you get from every music history textbook, just written more journalistically with punchier adjectives.

* edit: I'm misremembering. Rachmaninoff actually got a musical example (as did Medtner) and while Puccini didn't get much he did point out that Puccini's music remains more popular than that of almost every other composer he's going to talk about for the rest of the volume and question whether we were really going about historiography the right way if we penned histories which skip straight from Mahler to Schoenberg. i suppose there are similar concessions elsewhere for composers/movements/other things he doesn't feel like getting into.
[/quote
Yes!!Well OK. Well maybe? No that is not quite rite. I am not sure Mozart was all confused but I am. Maybe there is truth and beauty somewhere? How do I find it?















Yes!!Well OK. Well maybe? No that is not quite rite. I am not sure Mozart was all confused but I am. Maybe there is truth and beauty somewhere? How do I find it?

[xochitl]

i generally find taruskin extremely irritating, illuminating, irritating, [chuckle chuckle here and there], exasperating, extremely illuminating, and pedantic

but never dull. so