Notes on a revolution

A bold attempt to view a century of music through its leading iconoclasts is to be applauded

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
By Alex Ross
Fourth Estate, 512pp, £20

THE IMPRESSIVELY AMBITIOUS idea behind Alex Ross's book is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music. We start with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, "the titans of Austro-German music" in Graz, on 16 May 1906. Strauss is there to conduct a performance of his opera, Salome. It turns into an extraordinary night – not because of the shrieks, discords and howls of the music but because, to Mahler's astonishment, the audience loves it.

This may have been "just one event in a busy season but, like a flash of lightning, it illuminated a musical world on the verge of traumatic change. Past and future were colliding; centuries were passing in the night." Vividly actualised and astutely analysed, the episode also serves as a model for the book as a whole. Time and again Ross finds an event that expresses a larger movement – a person or a scene in which tendencies and meaning converge. In Paris, Claude Debussy and Erik Satie stand for a "stripped-down, folk-based, jazz-happy" avant-garde, while in Vienna Arnold Schoenberg and his 12-tone progeny, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, illuminate "the terrible depths with their holy torches".

From Stravinsky to Sibelius to Schoenberg (who "learned instrumental forms by subscribing to an encyclopaedia, and waited for the S volume to arrive before composing a sonata"), the emerging heavyweights of the new music are sketched with a brevity and confidence that are the products, surely, of deep immersion and study.

Nevertheless, with so much ground to cover, after 150 pages one fears that the book may subside into a linked series of adroitly composed profiles. Fortunately, just as things begin to sag, totalitarianism comes to the rescue. As Ross examines the compromised fate of composers under Stalin and Hitler, the book again rises to embrace its darker purpose. Inevitably, Dmitri Shostakovich is the emblematically contorted figure, moving from derisory laughter at the very idea of having to explain "the socioeconomic dimensions of the music of Chopin and Liszt" to an uncomfortable accommodation with the state that both facilitates and threatens his work.

In post-Wagnerian Germany, meanwhile, could something ominous be heard looming in all those "humongous Teutonic symphonies"? Conceding from the outset that "no composer more painfully exhibited the moral collapse of German art than Richard Strauss", Ross probes with dexterity the composer's complex, often contradictory relationship to the Nazi regime. This is where the debate at the conceptual heart of Ross's undertaking is thrown into sharpest focus: is the history of music self-contained or can a larger, extramusical history be distilled from it?

Actually, as Ross makes clear, the alternatives are mutually implicated and imbricated: "precisely because of its inarticulate nature," music is "all too easily imprinted with ideologies and deployed to political ends."

With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, The Rest Is Noise is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement – so much so that at times history itself seems bent on playing into Ross's hands. Who could have imagined that, as a "surreal" consequence of the rise of fascism, many of the giants of European classical music – Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov and Otto Klemperer – would end up living on each other's doorsteps in Los Angeles? In such proximity, events of world-historical importance offered an irresistible incentive to pettiness. When NBC broadcast Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony in 1942, most of the emigré composers "experienced a mass attack of envy and resentment".

Schoenberg and Stravinsky both did their best to squeeze huge fees from sympathetic Hollywood studios. Thereafter, scoring music for films became one of the principal ways in which new orchestral music maintained a viable position in the cultural marketplace. And while America produced both homegrown composers of "straight music" (to use the jazzer's preferred term) and composers of popular music deserving classic status – Ellington, Gershwin, Bernstein – many of the most challenging ideas of the avant-garde were disseminated through jazz (often regarded as "black classical music").

This means that, in the postwar years, Ross's catchment area has to be extended still further. Inevitably, as we draw closer to the present, the quantity and range of material make it difficult for the book to sustain the concentration achieved mid-century. The fragmentation of the musical centre means that the story becomes dispersed, and we are urged, irresistibly, toward the cultural edges. With its obligation to touch on the likes of American Terry Riley, Russian Alfred Schnittke and Brit Thomas Adès, the book begins to resemble a reference work in narrative guise. The centrifugal force generated by the attempt to be comprehensive also causes a distortion of emphasis.

Perhaps the problem rests on the necessary if unsustainable distinction between improvisation and composition. John Coltrane is mentioned but, relatively speaking, his importance here seems to derive from the way Steve Reich saw him play. Keith Jarrett does not get a look-in, even though his improvised solo piano concerts in some ways represent the culmination of virtuoso classical performance stretching back to Liszt.

It would be unfair, though, to dwell on omissions when so much has been included. The Rest Is Noise is a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand "more seeingly" in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.