The Rest Is Noise | Alex Ross | Talks at Google

Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for coming out today. It's really great to see all of you here. So I want to welcome you to today's Author Google event. It's my pleasure to introduce New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. Alex has been at the New Yorker since 1996. Prior to that, he was critic at the New York Times. A graduate of Harvard College, he currently lives in Manhattan. Can you guys hear me? All right? He's here today to talk about his new book, the Rest Is Noise listening to the 20th century, which tells the history of the past hundred or so years through music. Writing about the book in the LA Weekly, Alan Rich called it the best book on what music is about, really about that you and I will ever own. So Alex is going to be speaking and then taking questions from you guys. We ask if you do have a question, please use the microphone. After the event, Alex will be signing books for anyone who's interested. So with that, please join me in welcoming Alex Ross.

Hi. Well, it's very nice to be here. Am I audible? Fully audible to everyone? Yeah. I'm a little worried about that very nice thing that Alan Rich said about my book. I hope it doesn't start some kind of backlash and people say, no, it's the worst music book that anyone has ever written. But no, it's really amazing to be publishing a book for the first time and trying to shine some light on a subject that I care very deeply about and am really thrilled about. And a lot of random people on the street aren't so thrilled about or knowledgeable about what's gone on in classical music in the last hundred years or so. Classical music has the reputation, in fact, of having stopped died somewhere around 1900. And this is a mistake that you can easily make by looking at the programs, the symphony orchestras and the repertory of opera houses. You tend to see pieces from the 1800s, some from the 1700s, and not so many from the 20th century, although I think this is slowly changing. And there's this idea in the air in general about what classical music is and what it sounds like. And it would be something like this. Sort of pass the claret music to steal a joke from Robert Kriscow. But classical music also sounds like this. Stravinsky's famous Rite of Spring. And it also sounds like this, The Rhapsody in Blue. And it also sounds like this, One of Karl Heinz Stockhausen's greatest hits, Gruppen from 1955, 1957. And then there is this. That's a piece called Aire by Osvaldo Galiov and at first encounter, you might not think it's called classical music at all, but indeed it is the work of a fully trained, accredited classical composer who in this day and age has decided to do something quite different. So overall, if you put all of these pieces into the category of classical music, and then perhaps you throw in music from prior centuries, going back to medieval chant from the year 1000 or so, you end up with a kind of music that is really difficult to generalize about. My opinion, actually, is that classical music doesn't exist in the sense of being a particular sound, a single sound coming from a single place. What classical music is, is what composers do, which is to listen to the music of their own time and the music of prior periods, whether it is folk music, dance music, composed notated music, and to pull it all together to create a new synthesis of different sounds. And that's a category that you can use to describe quite a bit of pop music too, as well as all of the giants of jazz. So it is very vague. These categories are vague. Roughly speaking, I'm still talking in my book about classical composition in the 20th century, but constantly, as the story goes on, I find these moments of overlap, especially in periods like the 1920s and 1930s, when Gershwin is writing music that's half classical and half jazz, or Tin Pan Alley and Aaron Copland, a classical composer, is borrowing from jazz, and Duke Ellington, who comes out of the world of jazz, is writing pieces that are moving in the direction of symphonic music, orchestral music. And it happens again in the 19th century, 60s and 1970s, when minimalist composers are trading ideas with progressive rock bands and modern jazz artists. So I'm very convinced that whenever we tell these stories about music, we have to be careful of the generalizations and aware of how music is really a huge continuum. And it's very difficult in the end to make sharp distinctions between one kind of music and another. And the 20th century is a century in which everything exploded and everything was mixed together in really surprising ways. What I'd like to do, for a few minutes perhaps, is to give an insanely rapid aerial tour of the 20th century and play a few sounds. For some of you, this may all be familiar territory from. For others, it may be new and may enable you. If someone comes up to you at a cocktail party and says, do you really ultimately think it was a good idea for Stravinsky to move from neoclassical tonality to 12 tone writing in the latter part of his career, you can say, oh, well, perhaps, or perhaps not. It Depends on what you mean by neoclassicism, doesn't it? And just to give a sense of sort of really, really quick glimpse of the sounds that lie behind these mysterious terms that are bandied about when connoisseurs and fanatics start babbling away about 20th century music, the first term that comes to mind is atonality. This is a tendency in music that cropped up in the first decade of the 20th century and was certainly one of its most dramatic developments. It is very much associated with Arnold Schoenberg, the Viennese composer who began writing music that was very lush, very romantic, saturated in the harmonies of Wagner and Richard Strauss. And then there came a day when he sort of flipped out a little bit and decided to reject that legacy completely and to literally invent a new language for music. And this is what he came up with. So this is a tonality, simply meaning that tonality, the characteristic chords that have been used in hundreds of years in Western music, the major chords, the minor chords, they've pretty much disappeared from the scene. And the composer is using new harmonies, often sharply dissonant combinations of 5, 6, 7, 8 notes simultaneously to create an atmosphere of expressionistic angst and all out pandemonium. Now why did Schoenberg do this? In part, it's because he was part of an artistic vanguard which appeared in Vienna and the other European capitals around this time. Artists in all fields looking to get rid of bourgeois convention and to venture into new realms. And you think of the paintings of Kandinsky and Picasso and the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and the poetry of T.S. eliot, Ezra Pound, all across the spectrum, artists rejecting the familiar and often using a language that you can call abstract, that does not simply picture things as they are, but invents new worlds. Schoenberg in music really did the same thing and was very surprised to discover that there was a very violent reaction from the audience when he presented this music for the first time. Of course, all of these artistic developments caused little riots and scandals and hubbub of one kind or another. Whenever the early abstract paintings were displayed, people would say, that's just some guy throwing paint at a canvas and doesn't mean anything. But over time, those works were assimilated into our idea of what great art is, so that now paintings by Picasso sell for $100 million on the art market. Joyce's Ulysses is ranked the number one novel of the century, or something like that. I forget what exact accolade it received a couple years back. And in this sense that modernism has been Assimilated. But this Schoenberg music and all of the modernist music that followed from it still actually has the power to disturb, to unsettle people. And. And whenever the name Schoenberg appears on the program of your local symphony orchestra, you can be sure that there'll be some people grumbling in their seats, and there may be quite a few empty seats belonging to those who decided not to venture out that day if a big piece by Schoenberg is being played. Generally, a sense that this is a composer whose ideas are still strange. And I think there's a very easy explanation for this, which is that sound has physical properties which are peculiarly invasive. In a way, sound is a trembling of the air which enters into our bodies. And a strange, dissonant sound has quite a stronger effect on us than the equivalent experiment in the world of painting. Much more intellectual relationship, I think, that we have with visuals and also with the written word. Whereas music is very primal, it's very dissonant. And these intervals that make up Schoenberg's violent chords get under our skin. And it's literally about beats in the air, frequencies clashing and creating beats, and the human ear naturally reacting to them. Now, I think with some training and patience, people can actually find another dimension to Schoenberg's music. And there's a sense in which the music has this otherworldly, impressionistic beauty, as in his Second String Quartet, The Ladder. And actually, in this music, Schoenberg still is hovering on the threshold between tonality and atonality and is still making use of some familiar major minor chords. And there's actually a lot of music that we describe as atonal, which does have a novel beauty to it. And if you spend time with it and particularly understand what the composers were trying to express and where they were coming from, you might even be able to fall in love with it a little bit. And that's certainly the case with me. The trouble that I have with atonality is not the music itself very often, but some of the ideologies that became attached to it over the course of the time, 20th century. And some composers, starting with Schoenberg, writing somewhat bombastic pronouncements to the effect that this is the only music of the future, and all of the music is garbage. And either you are with us or against us in terms of the future of music. And that attitude and the kind of polemics and back and forth between different camps of composers wasn't so consistent. But the music itself is passionately felt. Schoenberg was a very serious and heartfelt artist. He wasn't playing any kind of game and he certainly meant what he wrote. And his music has had all kinds of unexpected influences. It's hard to imagine any action thriller or horror movie sequence in Hollywood film being created without the use of some eerie Schoenbergian chords in the background. No one had written such chords before Schoenberg came along. And his legacy is unexpectedly present everywhere in our entertainment world. It's just that strange things happen when you put the music into a concert hall and put it next to a Beethoven symphony. That's when the trouble starts for some culture classical concert goers. Now I want to turn to Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring music that is pretty familiar to most people. Stravinsky is also using a lot of dissonance in his music, but he's mixing it with these little melodies that swirl around in this passage from the Rite of Spring that are derived from folk music. And he was a close observer of the folk music traditions of his native Russia and would borrow little fragments of melodies from Oliver and combine them together, sort of collage technique, crunch them together into these dissonant chords and then pull them back apart so you can hear the melodies emerging. The Rite of Spring, of course, the piece that set off the famous riot in Paris at its premiere in 1913 and caused a great war in the concert hall, in the theater between the progressives, on the one hand, the bohemians and the lovers of everything new in art and. And high society elements who are present. And when that music started, they proceeded to start shouting back and forth at each other, in some cases getting into physical altercations. A lady banging a gentleman's hat with her umbrella, that kind of thing. And the music became completely inaudible for the remainder of the performance. But almost immediately thereafter, people started falling in love with Stravinsky's music for all kinds of reasons, because there is still so much melody in it, despite the dissonance of some of the chords and the fact that it is such a potent piece, such a viscerally rhythmic piece. After 19th century where composers are so concerned with melody and harmony and constructing grand forms and sort of leading to the climax of Wagner's evening long music dramas. So Stravinsky came along and said, forget about all that. Let's have a music that is about rhythm, about syncopation, unexpected accents, sudden changes, textures melting one into the other kind of cinematic style of composition, quick cuts, elements piled on top of each other, then being pulled apart. Incredibly modern score that also Had a. A pop appeal to it. And I think it actually looked ahead to some of the pop music to come in terms of its emphasis on rhythm and the enormous sort of primitive energies that unleashed, in a way, maybe the original pop masterwork as well as a monument of the 20th century classical tradition. The interesting thing about Stravinsky is that having written that piece and shocked everyone with it, he then shocked everyone by never writing anything like it again. And the whole remainder of his career consisted of constant left turns, right turns, reinventions, sort of Madonna like, almost in his ability to refashion his identity from decade to decade and even year to year. Especially in the 1920s, when suddenly he was writing music like this, Music that's really stripped down and getting rid of all extraneous elements. Writing for small ensembles, basically a cafe band, almost a jazz band in the instrumentation. And this is what we call neoclassicism. A sense of going back to harmonies of the 18th century, 17th centuries even, but sort of twisting them around again, collage style, putting in these spiky little distances and unexpected turns. And he was also listening to popular music, to jazz as well as the older dance forms. This is the Stravinsky version of a tango. So it was a really amazing period in the 1920s when composers decided that anything could be incorporated into a classical piece and anything could be folklore, whether it was pop music or the music of the distant past, the 18th century, using the sounds of industry and the modern city as a source for composition time. A wild experiment all through the 1930s. I'll play a little bit of one of my personal favorites in this literature. Hans Eisler, the German composer who later in the 1920s became a political firebrand. He rejected the idea of modern music as a very esoteric pursuit. He wanted to write for the workers, for those fighting in the streets, for communism in particular. He was a die hard communist. So he wrote this very rousing anthem called Der Heimeche Aufmarsch, the Secret Mobilization, which has something to do with workers of the world finding solidarity with the struggle of the Soviet Union. The Herrscher Welt Getting the Armada Classe and Angrif Gigging the Soviet Union. Mr. Stolsen Herz the revolution on the creek. The yet Stoilenda Gate with a creaking dick. Very rousing stuff. Makes you want to go out and kill for spring. Stalin, an attack on the Soviet Union was a stab in the heart of the revolution. The 1930s and 1940s. For me, writing my book was incredibly fascinating period because there are These amazing collisions of composers and politics and the social upheavals and terrifying events of the 1930s and 40s, whether it was Shostakovich on the phone with Stalin, as he was told, the correct kind of music he should be writing, or Aaron Copland in America sort of flirting with communism, hanging around on the edges of all kinds of communist front organizations, and writing music such as Appalachian Spring, which is an attempt to create a populist piece which expresses the longings of common people and the essential goodness of the American heartland before industry and global capital encroached upon it. And this is a very familiar sound because Copland's Americana style has become synonymous with America itself. Constantly used in political commercials and film scores and sort of a signifier of, you know, mourning in America. Music very similar to this was used in Reagan's commercials under that banner. But there are these very sharp leftist messages under the surface. And Copeland was, in his own way, quite a radical figure, even if he used seemingly simple sounding sounds. So from the first decades of the 20th century, composers veered toward the complex. And then in the 1930s and 40s, many of them tried to write a. In a populist style that reached out to the masses and communicated with all. There was another violence swerve after 1945 back toward the complex and towards some really ungodly sounds you could say that had never been imagined before in history and could never have been produced in history, because electronics now came into the page picture and the work of John Cage and Karlhein Stockhausen in unleashing total sonic pandemonium, as in the case of Cage's Williams mix, 1952. See you. This is a piece that actually took Cage almost a year to create. Now, you could do it in a few minutes on a laptop computer if you had all the sound samples, digital files, and just combine them all together. But back then, Cage and his associates spent month after month after month taking these tiny pieces of magnetic tape and stitching them together, splicing them together by hand, and adding to the laboriousness of it all. Cage is using the I Ching to make random decisions about what piece of tape should come next. So there had to be a lot of rolling of dice and flipping of coins before the next piece of tape could be chosen. And it only lasts about five minutes. But it did take six or nine months to write. Stockhausen was doing the same kind of thing in Germany at this time. And it's really interesting to contemplate the life stories of some of these composers and realize why they decided to so violently reject the music of the immediate past in the works, just right from the late 1940s and 1950s. This. I played a little bit of Stockhausen's Groupen before, and we can listen to it again if it's not. Not going to send more people from the room. Now, that piece, actually, for those of you who are into free jazz, might be very familiar sounding. It is very precisely notated and controlled in every single particular. But it does sound like a free improvisation. For there are, in fact, three orchestras arrayed there, each playing its own material at its own pace. And this was a time of all kinds of wild experiments with freeform music, with music sort of notes melting into textures and masses of sound, sliding from one to another in the works of Xenakis and Ligeti. The chance music of Cage, as I mentioned, and one after another, all of these revolutionary developments. These were composers who had lived through some horrible things in their teenage years, fighting in the last years of the Second World War. Stockhausen was a medical orderly who spent month after month carrying rotting corpses from the fighting fields into a church where they were piled up in mounds or trying to feed, give water to soldiers whose faces had melted away. Xanakis had part of his face blown off by a British shell. He was a Greek Communist fighting British forces in Greece at the very end of the war. And for the rest of his life, he had this kind of ghastly wound scar on his face. Ligeti lost most of his family in the Holocaust. And then once he got home to his parents, empty house. Stalinism arrived in Hungary shortly thereafter, and he had to deal with a whole different dimension of totalitarian terror before he finally escaped in 1956. And for him, for Ligeti, this avant garde music was pure music. And it was liberation from all of this very trite, kitschy music that he had been forced to write in his youth. It. That's a sound that may be familiar to those who've seen Stanley Kubrick's 2001, which borrows liberally from Ligety's music all the way through. The last major 20th century development that I want to just really briefly touch on is minimalism, which is very much a West coast, specifically California development. For me, it's the last great revolution in 20th century music. And what happens is another return to simplicity. Composers again swinging Pendulum like from one extreme to another. And for these young American composers who had grown up in the 1940s and 1950s with American pop culture, with jazz, and with a little bit of early rock and roll. There was no way that they could deal in the same kinds of issues as the European composers from the same period. They had to acknowledge the society in which they lived, as well as paying attention to what classical tradition gave to them. So when you hear music of Steve Reich, you're listening to a guy who grew up listening to Miles Davis. So what? Coltrane's Africa was a particular favorite for him. And he loved junior walker and the all star shotgun. And james brown. Come on home to me I love.

It tomorrow.

I love it today Help me. And of course, Bob Dylan. John is in the basement Mixing up the medicine I'm on a pavement Thinking about the government. All this music has homage, is that it's pretty much fixed on a single chord, or maybe two chords rocking back and forth. The harmony is frozen. There's not much moving the harmony. It's all about the voice and the instruments, spinning patterns, rhythmic patterns, or varying melodies over that unchanging harmonic ground. And that's the principle of, as well, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. Sam. Very slowly, over the course of this hour long piece, harmonies, melodies begin to emerge and there are gradual changes. So that after looking at a landscape which doesn't seem to be changing at all, suddenly you notice that objects have been slightly rearranged. Same kind of experience, I think, that you have driving across large distances in the American west, which is where Reich, a New Yorker, moved in the early 60s and had the breakthroughs that led to this minimalist style where nothing seems to be changing. And suddenly you noticed that the hill that was in front of the mountain has now shifted some ways to the left or the right. And it's a purely American music. I don't think any European could have come up with it having to do with an American sense of space, as well as being infused with American influences, especially from jazz and rock. And the great thing that happened was after the century in which classical music seemed to have drifted quite far from most people's sense of relevance and music that immediately mattered to them was that pop musicians really picked up on what Steve Reich and Terry Riley and Philip Glass were doing, and Brian Eno and David Bowie showed up at some of their concerts when they went to London. And the Velvet Underground really began as a minimalist band, emerging from the improvising ensemble of Lamont Young, the sort of proto minimalist composer who had his breakthrough while studying at Berkeley and on through to the present day, when people like Sufyan Stevens and Joanna Newsom and all kinds of India. Artists right now are very aware of the minimalist legacy, and they either quote it in their music or you can sense an influence under the surface. So it's an incredibly important development for 20th century music and classical music in general, to have composers participating in the mainstream culture and not disappearing into laboratories where their experiments have little impact outside small circles of connoisseurs. Which is not to devalue all of that music that came before because it too had all kinds of secret influences. And the Beatles could never have written the most experimental sections of sergeant Pepper's and the White Album without having encountered pieces by John Cage and Stockhausen. And just as so much of the music that we associate with the world of the Hollywood thriller and the horror movie and so on derives from Schoenberg, Bernard Herman's scores for the great Hitchcock classics could not have existed without the example of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok and Debussy and other early 20th century revolutionaries. So my whole point with this book is that this music, which seems so obscure and which many people know so little about, actually pervades every aspect of our musical world. And there are chains of connections which are so much fun to pursue, where you can go from just a few degrees of separation from the very esoteric and super refined Austrian 12 tone composer Anton Webern, to Lamont Young, who loved his music in his youth, to the Velvet Underground, who grew out of Lamont Young's ensemble, and then on through the rest of the music of today. So this music matters more, I think, than people give it credit for. And it's also just a hugely dramatic story. The cast of characters in my book is not just the composers themselves with their very arresting personalities, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes charming, but also really many of the major characters from 20th century history itself, whether it's the Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany in the first chapter of my book, to Hitler and Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the central chapters, to the Kennedys and psychedelic rock bands and many others who appear in the final chapter. So I guess I've gone through the whole 20th century in about 42 minutes, and. And I guess if people have questions now, I can answer them or babble on about other subjects. Yeah, right there. Could you wait for this? I'm sorry.

If I look at abstract art, for example, Picasso, whatever you might say about him, he was a fabulous technician. He could do really good stuff. And you could say that about Schoenberg, but a lot of the other musicians, I don't get that feeling that they were the fabulous technicians and My piano teacher, in fact, had a story about that to demonstrate how bad they were as technicians. So that's part one of my question is the fact that we don't like it because it really isn't very good. They're just, they're just lousy musicians. And the second part is, isn't the problem not so much tonal versus atonal as it is melody versus lack of melody.

Well, I mean, I see where you're coming from, particularly when you get into the post war period and you have these very experimental composers who don't have a track record with more familiar kinds of music as Schoenberg did. And anyone who's heard Schoenberg's early romantic pieces knows that this is a man who could write a melody, who could just really bewitch your ears with orchestration that's just magical and glistening in a dream world of sound. And then he very deliberately makes this decision, no, I'm going to write something completely different. But yeah, a lot of listeners do have that grudging respect. Schoenberg could do it. He just decided to drive us nuts by refusing to write beautiful music and going off in this other direction in the post war period. Yeah, I mean, we're not sure what Stockhausen would have been able to come up with if he had been asked to write a symphony in E flat, but he certainly was hugely inventive in the technological aspect of creating synthesis sized sound. No one before Stockhausen and Herbert Eimart and a couple of other of these German experimenters in the early 1950s had tried to create music using purely synthesized sound. And they developed the early technique of it. Stockhausen later basically invented quadraphonic sound, or music coming from five speakers, in fact. And year after year he came up with these really exciting technical technological breakthroughs which were then applied in much more familiar and approachable ways by other people. So definitely, Schoenberg supposedly once said of John Cage that he was an inventor of genius, not necessarily a composer, but an inventor. And so a lot of these people are simply trying out new possibilities. They're not trying for this kind of synthesis and handsomely bringing together sounds that are familiar in sort of perfectly technically polished forms. They are throwing ideas out there and seeing what sticks. And again, the impact of these people is all around us. And Cage and Stockhausen really helped to shape popular music in all kinds of surprising ways. Again, that technique of, you know, creating collage by splicing tape together, that was something that was invented by Pierre Schaeffer and a couple of other French technician composers. And then Cage took it up and executed it on this really ambitious scale. And so many strands of music come from there. My attitude with this more extreme end of the 20th century Repertory is you can just take it or leave it. I don't like it when people use it to write off the entire period and say everything was going along so beautifully until 1900 or so and then all the composers went and said insane. And therefore, you know, we should ignore all of them and go back to our beloved Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. Because there is so much grand and beautiful and very accessible music from the 20th century as well. Copeland and Shostakovich obviously, but also someone like Olivier Messiah, who was sort of an avant gardist and an experimenter on the way one hand, but also had a very traditional side to him and wanted to express sublime, beautiful ideas toward a spiritual goal in some of his greatest works. And I'll play a bit of one of my absolute favorite 20th century pieces, from the Canyons to the Stars, which is inspired by the canyons of Utah, which he visited and fell in love with. And this, if I can find it, is the movement called Zion. Sa. There's a lot more where this came from, I think. Pieces that emerge from an experimental tradition, as Messian did, especially in the late 1940s, writing very super complex 12 tone music and then veering in a different direction. And you know, someone who did have total technical command of music and just saw a whole cosmos of different possibilities that he could experience, grasp.

I was just wondering if you have any plans to teach this sort of as a course now. I'm wishing there was like an audio CD to go along with the book.

Oh, well, I do have. I haven't done too much teaching, but it's actually something I would love to do. I mean, I would love to teach a whole kind of undergraduate style survey course on 20th century music because it is a subject that people do find is just more gripping than they might expect when you expose them to all the different kinds of music and tell some of the stories behind it. But in terms of listening to the music, I actually did put together rather laboriously after weeks and weeks of writing letters and getting permission for rights. These pages on my website, I have a website called theresisnoise.com and you can go to some pages called audio files and I've created one page for each chapter of my book where I have just a lot of brief excerpts from some of the music that I played here and dozens of. And dozens of others. And I Think it is really great when you do have just a snippet of the sound to go along with the attempted verbal evocations of what's going on. Because, of course, there are severe limits to what a writer can express about music. Everything ultimately is intangible and inexpressible and so personal, you know, a particular kind of music that that one person falls in love with another person will find completely loathsome. And this is the contradiction not only about this modern repertory, which is obviously very controversial and has divided people from the very moment it first appeared, but it's equally true of rock, of hip hop, of almost every style of pop music. There are its friends and its enemies. And our reactions to music are so personal. So, you know, I just urge people to approach this particular world with an open mind. And it is such a hugely diverse field that no matter what kind of sound you desire, you'll find it there somewhere. Whether it's, you know, toward the noisy or the lovely and simple end of the spectrum. And the music that excites me most actually does both at once, like Messian's music. Sometimes furiously dissonant, sometimes so pure and melodic and lyrical. Same goes for music of Alban Berg and John Adams. Our great Bay Area American master writes music that just sort of pulls together all of these different strands in the 20th century.

I want to thank you for a fascinating tour, even though it was only 42 minutes. Music of the 20th century. I would also add on the Messianist, the Terangalila Symphony about the creation of the universe, which is one of my favorites. I had two questions. One, you mentioned some of the innovations, like with Stravinsky, about the polyrhythms and the poly tonality, the use of the multiple orchestras that I believe it was Stockhausen. And I wanted to hear your estimation of the importance and history of Charles Ives, who actually had experimented with all of these things prior to any of these compositions. And the second question is. I don't know if you're familiar or if you can tell me about the book. This is yous Brain on the Effect of Music on the Brain. Brain from a Neurological Perspective by Daniel Levitin.

Yeah, actually, I haven't read the book. It's sitting there and I'm way behind on my reading. But people keep asking about it, so I gotta get around to reading it eventually. But, yeah, Eyes is an amazing figure. For those of you who don't know a man who made his living in the insurance business. And he was a really successful, successful insurance executive who came up with innovative schemes, basically for convincing people to buy life insurance that they didn't know they needed. And was. He didn't actually go door to door doing the hard sell. He wrote these theoretical manuals that the salesman would go out and use and made a huge amount of money doing that. And then on the side, he was writing this incredibly dense and sort of crazily complex music that makes use of all of this very familiar, purely American music in the form of marching band. Marching band music and sort of old church hymns. I'll play a quick sample of his. This is Putnam's Camp from his Three Places in New England. It starts piling one strand of music on top of another and sort of evoking the chaos of multiple bands colliding in a village square on the fourth of July, playing, you know, the same music at a different pace. And this kind of. So we love to just have three or four different familiar melodies playing simultaneously until they come to this fabulous tangle. And, yeah, this is an American version of this collage technique. And what Stravinsky and Bartok and some other Europeans were doing it around the same time. He did it really totally independently of all of them. He wrote his music in private from around 1900 to 1920, and only then did he begin to release it to the world. And everyone was shocked to discover that this revolutionary, incredibly innovative American composer had been among us all along, making money in insurance and writing music on the weekends. So, you know, another great story in the 20th century, and I'm glad you mentioned that, and I do have a chapter in my book where I talk about Ives and this whole period in American music that is so hard to classify, from 1900 to 1930 or 1940. And I talk about Duke Ellington. I talk about some of the African American American composers who tried to make their living in classical music and failed and then moved into popular music instead. I talk about Gershwin, another master of synthesis, as well as ultra modern American composers such as Carl Ruggles and Edgar Vares, who came from France and became this revolutionary New York composer. So that in itself you could write a whole book about the explosion of American music. After years and years of European imitations, finally American composers found their own voices in these really exciting ways. Do we have time for one more question? There's someone in the back. Sorry. You had your hand up for a while. Yeah, yeah.

I was just interested to see what in the last seven years over the 21st century has really been impressive to you, or do you think maybe indicative of some sort of trend that this century may be headed in, particularly as like a two part to that question, how the explosion of the Internet and modern technology allowing the common person to make all sorts of different compositions on the computer.

Right. Actually, I just wrote an article about classical music on the Internet, which is in this week's New Yorker. After I started my blog three years ago, or actually before that, I was already noticing how classical music was thriving on the Internet in some unexpected ways. And you might think it would be the last art form in the last genre that would be able to find a home on this very hip new medium. And instead, actually, I think classical musicians and composers and critics and writers and just plain listeners discovered that by starting a blog or by starting a personal website and putting samples of their music up there, or using the Internet in some other way, they could reach an audience that was being denied to them in a lot of ways, because the mainstream media in this country doesn't have a lot of time for classical music. And there just seemed to be a kind of collective executive decision that was made sometime between 1980 and the year 2000 that classical music was just too elitist or effete or something. Something was wrong with it. And suddenly classical musicians were no longer appearing on the covers of magazines and no longer being featured on network television. And it was just all kind of shelved. I write for one of very few national publications that does give some space to classical music. Time and Newsweek and some other publications got rid of their classical critics several years ago and have never replaced them. So it's hard to just have a conversation about this music on national level right now. And the Internet has made it totally possible. And so there's been this explosion of hundreds of classical music blogs and hundreds upon hundreds of composite web sites. And to get to your question, I mean, yeah, there's this insane variety of music out there. And I think we're in a period where it's just basically impossible to make generalizations about the state of music right now. Because all of these innovations and all these trends that happen in the 20th century, they're still very much alive. I mean, none of them has really been cut short. Minimalism is still having a big impact on younger composers. The whole atonal modernist tradition still has quite a bit of appeal for those who want to rebel against the system or whatever. And you find, you know, 20 year old composers who grew up listening to noise bands, who, you know, discover Schoenberg and Stockhausen and realize, hey, you know, these old German guys have been doing this for a While. And getting into composition as a way to find a new avenue to express what they want to express. So all across the spectrum, there are so many different things happening. And yeah, I mean, again, on my page devoted to sort of end of the 20th century, first years of the 21st century, on my blog, the audio samples from my book, I give about eight or 10 examples, basically showing that it is so hard to make a general statement about what's going on in music right now. And again, there should be something you can find to like, no matter what it is that you want to hear. I would say, though, if I were to make one shaky generalization, I still think minimalism is. Is a really powerful development, maybe still the most significant going on right now. And what's happening is that people are applying that idea of music based on just a few simple chords and some steady rhythmic repetition and using it to assimilate so many different sounds, whether it's influences from pop or sort of global world music. And composer like Oslo de Gaullev, who's. I played the sample from his song Ayre, and I'll play a little more of that just to close. He was really influenced by minimalism in his youth and also by Stravinsky, actually. And this idea of, you know, let's listen to some folk music. And this cycle is based on different kinds of musical styles that existed in Moorish Spain, actually. Some ancient folk melodies and dance patterns and weaving a new language out of the them. And again, it doesn't sound like cosmos at all, but it comes out of the principle of Stravinsky building up the braid of spring from folk melodies and Reich listening very carefully to the music of the screen and the rise and fall of human voices and just everyday pop music that he grew up with and creating a language out of that. So Galiov is a really amazing composer working right now. He mixes composition with improvisation and all these multicultural influences.

And they call me it.

The great thing about that is the singer is Dawn Upshaw, a very noted operatic soprano who made her name singing Mozart and very mainstream operatic repertory. In recent years. She has been singing a lot of new music, and she's reinvented her voice in many different ways to assimilate what composers right now are doing. So, you know, I can never get over how she's. How she managed to make her voice do those things in that song after all that operatic training. But anyway, thank you all for coming out. It's been great to be here.