Four Musical Reads
It’s January, and music is our theme. Here’s a list of essential titles to keep up your musical spirits during what is traditionally a quiet month…
Article by Kate Slotover
It’s hard not to feel daunted by the six-hundred pages of type that is The Rest is Noise by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. The book came out in 2008 and like this reviewer you may already have a copy lurking unread on a shelf. I beg you, though, to pull it out and get reading. The premise is simple: a survey of twentieth-century classical music. But what a century, and what music. Ross sets his composers in context, we learn of their everyday lives, and the larger social and political forces that surround them. He is as good on the smaller details as he is at the bigger picture, but the invisible net that holds this wealth of information together is an interpersonal one; Ross traces the connections between people, he follows feelings, emotions, rivalries, inspiration, love. ‘Composing is a difficult business …’, he writes, ’What emerges is an artwork in code, which other musicians must be persuaded to unravel.
Unlike a novel or a painting, a score gives up its full meaning only when it is performed in front of an audience; it is a child of loneliness that lives off crowds.’ And so we begin with a shocked crowd roaring its approval for Richard Strauss’s Salomé before embarking on a breathtaking journey through the sounds and events of the twentieth-century. It’s possible to listen to music without knowing the background; it’s hard not to feel thrilled, though, at the difference when you listen with understanding – this is the door that for the uninitiated, Ross’s book unlocks. ‘In twentieth century music, through all the darkness, guilt, misery and oblivion, the rain of beauty never ended.’ It’s a pretty good way to start the New Year.
To explore more deeply check out Ross’s own audio guide here:
www.therestisnoise.com
An understanding of modernist classical music isn’t necessary to appreciate
Orfeo, by Richard Powers, but if you took the time to read
The Rest is Noise you’ll feel pleasantly at home here. Peter Els, elderly composer and amateur chemist, places a call to the police, setting in motion a chain of events that builds to a surprising climax. It’s unclear at the beginning how his scientific tinkering relates to his music-driven inner thoughts, but gradually the different strands of the narrative come together. As complex as a symphony, this is a novel where the idea behind what Els is trying to achieve is so brilliant and original you end up feeling slightly in awe of the writer who came up with it. A novel that dazzles and surprises in equal measure.
Richard Powers references a number of composers, from Mahler and Messiaen to Steve Reich and John Cage. A playlist here:
OrfeoFrom a novel about a composer to one written by a musician, Wolf in White Van is by John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. Anyone who has seen Darnielle play or listened to his albums will know that his music and lyrics have a warmth and intimacy that surrounds often heartbreaking themes; Darnielle’s writing proves to have the same qualities. Sean is a young man with severe facial disfigurement from a shotgun wound, although we don’t learn how this occurred until the book’s conclusion. Almost completely withdrawn from the world Sean compensates with a rich inner life that leads him to develop a role-playing game called Trace Italian. There’s a simplicity to the events and the plot – in terms of complexity it’s a world away from Orfeo, for example – but as with a successful song there is something haunting and beautiful about this novel that somehow transcends the words on the page. Special mention, by the way, for the elegant and appropriate cover design.
There’s many a Mountain Goats album to choose from, but here’s one of your reviewer’s favourites; ‘This Year’ is a particularly good one for January:
The Mountain Goats – The Sunset TreeCarl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love was first published in 2007, part of Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ series of books about music. Recently reissued with a new collection of essays complementing Wilson’s own work, this is an interesting study on the question of taste. Taking as his subject Céline Dion’s album Let’s Talk About Love (the one with the Titanic song on it) Wilson’s starting point is his own intense dislike of Dion’s music. Rather than simply accepting this, however, he embarks on a thoughtful and entertaining journey to try to decode his own reaction. Although the essay has a tendency to veer into the academic, which can be somewhat heavy going (but who knows, this may be the bit you like most), in general Wilson’s style is fluent and accessible; he includes elements of his own personal history at the same time as digging into Dion’s background, exploring the things that make her who she is. At the very least Wilson’s book about the inherent ’sociability of taste’ will probably change the way you think about Céline Dion; at best it will make you reassess your own value system and leave you feeling you can start 2015 open to anything.
