Rating:  -
Often Ross is a very thoughtful commentator of classical and modern music but this book is rubbish. He makes unsubstantiated correlation between German imperialism and German composers and equalizes 12 tone music with totalitarian systems. Instead of illuminating for the reader the different musical periods he unleashes his bias against teutonic music and composers. The only composer who gets a good review is fellow American John Adams, who is praised for taking a stance against the brutal European music and military forces. This is a thoroughly unnecessary book and gives Ross' reputation a big fat stain.
Rating:  -
I really wanted just one thing from this book -- to be better able to listen to and enjoy music from the 20th century that is more on the dissonant, arrhythmic, "grating" side. I got it, basically. Hooray for Alex Ross.
I tried for a long time to enjoy some of the century's less accessible compositions, and just couldn't get into it. For me, "less accessible" even included many compositions by Béla Bartók, like his string quartets -- let alone the more avant garde composers of later in the century.
The book gave me exactly what an overintellectualizing guy like myself needed -- a framework in which to think of 20th century music, and thereby to allow myself to enjoy it better.
Ross structures much of the book around clear chronological and geographic lines. I really enjoyed the way he divided up the years 1933-1945 into chapters on Russia, the US and Germany. His presentation of the Depression and WWII era was very powerful. It also inspired a certain kind of patriotic feeling for me as an American reader -- comparing musical life under Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin was a pretty stark contrast. I'll let you guess which country came across as the kind of place you'd like to live.
This basic structure -- switching between the US, Germany and Russia in various eras of the last century -- actually holds true for much of the book. Of course, there are excursions into other countries as well -- France receives attention, and there are full, dedicated chapters on Jean Sibelius and Benjamin Britten, for example. At the very end, the attention goes briefly global as composers like Takemitsu and other non-Europeans enter the picture.
Of course, Ross does make some fairly subjective or even "arbitrary" decisions, like deciding that the modern era started with Richard Strauss's opera "Salome". Of course the situation really wasn't nearly so cut and dried. There can also be quibbling on which composers he focused on and which he didn't -- do Sibelius and Britten really deserve separate chapters if Stravinsky and Schoenberg don't?
In Ross's favor, however, he defends his "Salome" decision adequately and really isn't very dogmatic about it. And he couldn't have treated Stravinsky or Schoenberg in separate chapters without entirely giving up his chronological-geographic structure. Both of them had careers stretching over vastly different periods (prewar, WWI, WWII, postwar), not to mention their moves from Europe to the US.
As I write this review, the Schoenberg violin concerto is ringing in my headphones. It's a very, very fun piece that I couldn't relax into or "get" before. Thanks, Alex Ross.
I have to admit, though, that I'm still working on Takemitsu. Maybe one of these days.
Rating:  -
So, let's see. Modern music began with Strauss' opera "Salome," which premiered in 1906, right? Yes, says Ross in this lengthy, boring, chatty, overwritten, superficial tome. What do you say? Is that your final answer?
Survey sez: BZZZZZT ... Saying that modern music began with Strauss is like saying that modern poetry began with Pound, Yeats, or Eliot. Totally wrong. Modern poetry began with ... wait for it ... Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal," first published in 1857, though many of the poems are much older, written when this extraordinary genius and absolute master of alexandrine form was in his 20s, i.e., in the 1840s.
So, who was there at the beginning? Stravinsky sez: Beethoven, specifically, the "Great Fugue" from the B flat string quartet. Apparently, this fact completely escaped Ross' notice, or else he doesn't agree with Igor -- though, thanks to Ross, I now know what Shostakovich liked for breakfast (kidding) and that everybody called Morton Feldman "Morty." The photo of Schoenberg playing Harry Homeowner watering his plants in Hollywood was pretty cool, though.
What about impressionism? Is that original with Debussy and company? Nothing against Debussy -- quite the contrary, Pelleas et Melisande is a wonderful opera -- but again, there are lots of such effects in Beethoven, all over the place, e.g., the Fourth Piano Concerto, also in Chopin. Neither thought they were more than that and left well enough alone.
What about minimalism, i.e., Glass, Reich, and Riley. You're probably thinking I'm gonna say the idea is from Beethoven again, e.g., "Moonlight" Sonata. Well, you're wrong. The idea of creating music out of ... nonmusic by means of iteration, i.e., no tune just a rhythm, is from the scherzo of Op. 59 No. 1, which got a big laugh when Beethoven's buddies saw the score for the first time. They told him it wasn't music and refused to play it -- no, I'm not kidding.
What's my point? There are serious errors of omission in this book that for me pretty much wrecked the author's credibility. I slogged through it just to finish it, speed reading many parts at the end because the writing is so annoying, as if Ross is trying to figure out how many parts of speech to cram into a sentence. That particular race was won long ago by Swinburne.
A final thought. What's wrong with modern music is that a lot of it is simply not memorable. You hear it and then when you walk out of the concern hall you can't remember anything you heard. Some of it made an impression (good or bad), but that's it, nothing lingers. It doesn't help at all to have someone who has technical knowledge of music try to "explain" it to you, as Ross does. The music should speak for itself. It did at one time, and I hope it will again.
P.S. Missing from Ross' recommendation list are Glass' string quartets. There is only one performance available, a rather flabby one by Kronos, but it should give an idea. Check it out.
Rating:  -
This book does for modern music what Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New did for modern art - provides both the layperson and the initiate with a perfect primer for a dense and difficult cultural epoch.
Ross tells the story in an engaging style and smartly links the works and their creators to contemporary trends and events. His chapter on Shostakovich is especially gripping, evoking the claustrophobic conditions under which the Soviet composer labored in a critical but compassionate manner.
Theoretical analysis is present throughout the text but is easily skipped over if incomprehensible. The only serious drawback to the book is that the music doesn't play as you read.
Rating: -
Alex Ross gives a phenomenal overview of twentieth century music in the 500 some pages in this book. While the single stories about pieces and composers are great on their own, he ties them all together while providing a cohesive sense of trajectory and shape in musical history. Often times twentieth century music can seem very disjointed within individual genres, let alone across all genres, but Ross successfully exposes the underlying line and motion of the century in musical terms, from Strauss and Gershwin all the way to John Adams and Bjork.
One of the greatest strengths of this book is its presentation of music in its historical context. Obviously a music history book will have history in it, but Ross's history includes everything from politics, war and science to literature and the visual arts. I learned as much about history in general as I learned about music from this book. As Ross states, contrary to Hitler's beliefs, music is NOT an "absolute art" that maintains its autonomy outside of history. Music is a living breathing organism that develops as a part of the culture from which it comes, and we cannot understand music without understanding its context. Ross takes the reader into the life and times of the composer and audience to better understand the music. From Strauss in Nazi Germany to Shostakovich and Prokofiev in Stalin's Russia, Ross brings the music alive as a part of the history that created it, deepening our potential understanding and interpretation of these pieces.
I have a BA in piano and music history and am starting my MM in piano this fall, but after reading this book I still feel incredibly musically ignorant. I have added a hundred or so pieces to my "to-listen-to" list and a few to my "to-play" list as well. This book and the pieces mentioned in it are definitely worth your time to read AND listen.
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