I finished reading The Rest is Noise this morning and it is a really fabulous book which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I spent a long time with it, not because it was at all difficult, but more because it was such a joy…..
Hmmm. I seem to be saying that a lot of late.
I was just a teeny tiny bit disappointed that the last quarter of the 20th century seemed to get short shrift, at least in the number of pages devoted to it, but then "classical" and "pop" seem like such archaic terms to me today, that an adequate discussion of the last 20 or 30 years would probably take an entire book in and of itself.
I was particularly struck by this quote from the epilogue:
"At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the impulse to pit classical music against pop culture no longer makes intellectual or emotional sense. Young composers have grown up with pop music ringing in their ears, and they make use of it or ignore it as the occasion demands. They are seeking the middle ground between the life of the mind and the noise of the street. Likewise, some of the liveliest reactions to twentieth century and contemporary classical music have come from the pop arena, roughly defined."
And this reminds me of a talk by Leon Botstein, given several years ago at the opening concert of one of the Bard Music Festivals, I don't remember which one, but it was a 20th century composer, possibly Schoenberg. Basically Botstein said that this music (whatever it was) was easy for members of his generation (or my generation and younger) and what is truly difficult for those of us who grew up listening to the 20th century, particularly the latter half of the 20th century, is the music of Haydn and Mozart.
This overlapping of influences and sounds is so much a part of life, and perhaps I am truly just not enough of an intellectual, that it seems difficult to completely separate out the threads of Schoenberg and Stravinsky from Reich, Adams, Talking Heads, Takemitsu, Björk, Coltrane, and Lou Reed. I am not speaking literally here, just jumbling together the thoughts that come out of my mind. I hope you understand.
But the music of Mozart or Beethoven,of Haydn or Brahms, much as I adore it, now that is something different. Oh they provide a sort of background. We have all heard the melodies. But to listen, to sit back and actually listen to what they produce – that requires a completely different kind of mental attention, one that perhaps our forebears were more readily trained. Is it that our ears are different? Or have we formed different mental synapses?
Now I need to go listen to some music.
Comments
One response to “Reading about Music”
Interesting quotation and good questions you raise. My years (alright, decades!) of playing piano, first taking lessons, then giving them, not to mention analysing these classical works as well as their baroque (etc!) forebears, means they are still more accessible to me than more contemporary works, but I think you’re absolutely right that pop’s adoption of, and play with, the kinds of harmonies and structures and (non) melodies that used to shock means that we don’t have to do as much intellectual filtering to appreciate what used to be thought of as avant-garde. We’re also, through many branches of “ethnic” music, much broader to possibilities, I’d say, than the more Euro-centric audience of a hundred, even fifty, years ago.
Thanks for the reference to what looks like an interesting read.