runner -> The Rest is Noise (Sep. 27 2015 23:24:25)
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Upon recommendation, I retrieved Alex Ross' book on 20th century music from the local library, and have completed reading it. I prefer reading books to reading reviews about books, so I approached Ross without preconceptions. Having finished it, I turned to the usual blurbs of praise on the back of the dust jacket. My own suggestion for those interested in the topic is to read the book, of course, but also then to compare and contrast The Rest is Noise with the 1997 edition of Harold C. Schonberg's The Lives of the Great Composers, starting on p.378 of Schonberg and reading on to the end on p.619. In my opinion, Schonberg easily bests Ross both in quality of argument and quality of presentation. But you be the judge. But Ross does offer some tantalizing suggestions as to the state of music, and by extension, the other arts, today. I offer some quotes: From the Preface: "in the twentieth century, however, musical life disintegrated into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon. Some genres have attained more popularity than others; none has true mass appeal." From Chapter 11, Brave New World: "Music exploded into a pandemonium of revolutions, counter revolutions, theories, polemics, alliances, and party splits. The language of modern music was reinvented on an almost yearly basis: twelve-tone composition gave way to 'total serialism', which gave way to chance music, which gave way to a music of free-floating timbres, which gave way to neo-Dada happenings and collages and so on." From After the End: "Styles of every description--minimalism, post-minimalism, electronic music, laptop music, Internet music, New Complexity, Spectralism, doomy collages and mystical meditations from Eastern Europe and Russia, appropriations of rock, pop, and hip-hop, new experiments in folkloristic music in Latin America, the Far East, Africa, and the Middle East-- jostle against each other, none achieving supremacy." Why does this kind of talk remind me of something I once read somewhere else.....
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