I've been a regular reader of Alex Ross's music blog, The Rest is Noise, for several years.  Now, I've just finished reading his book, The Rest is Noise:  Listening to the Twentieth Century, and thought I'd jot down a few notes here. 

  It's a terrific book, one that deserves all the praise and awards it has raked in since first being published in late 2007.  Ross sets a clear task for himself:  "This has been a book," he writes near the end, "about the fate of composition in the twentieth century."  He wants to show that post-1900 classical music fits snugly into the long-accepted historical narrative of Western classical music.  In other words, he argues that the string that begins with Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven should be extended to include such names as Cage, Ellington, and Boulez. 

   It's hard to exaggerate the importance of this gesture.  While modernist painting, sculpture, literature and theater long ago won acceptance from mainstream audiences, many music lovers continue to resist the complex pleasures that recent works offer.  Just a couple of months ago, I watched several audience members walk out in the middle of a brilliant performance by the Chicago Symphony of Lutoslawski's 4th Symphony.

   Moreover, Ross carries out his task with verve and sensitivity.  His passion for his material is infectious, and as I read I constantly found myself running to my CD collection or the Internet to listen to the piece that he was describing (Ross's website includes a helpful selection of musical samples for readers of the book).  He's constructed his story skillfully, opening with Strauss's Salome and Mahler's 6th Symphony and showing how those two works and the problems they raised would continue to reverberate, directly or indirectly, in the works of hundreds of composers, down to the present day.

    Even we celebrate Ross's marvelous accomplishment, though, I think we also need to keep in mind what he has left out.  No book can include everything, of course, and one of the thing Ross admirably accomplishes is the insertion of African-American composers such as Duke Ellington into the mainstream narrative.  But we should also note, for example, that with the exception of a few scattered references throughout and then a small section in the final chapter, Ross's version of twentieth century music takes place almost wholly in Europe and North America.  Asia, Africa, and South America are largely afterthoughts. 

   Moreover, Ross's decision to focus on composers necessarily sidelines the role of performers, producers, promoters, and audiences--the whole range of people who carry out the act of what musicologist Christopher Small calls "musicking."  Given that much of twentieth century music has been performer-centered (with, for example, the importance of improvisation in jazz, rock and modernist classical music), Ross's emphasis on composers inevitably leads to a somewhat distorted view of the century he wants us to hear. 

   I'm reminded somewhat of Greil Marcus's similarly brilliant opus, Mystery Train:  Images of American in Rock 'n' Roll Music.  Marcus argues passionately for the cultural importance of Robert Johnson, Elvis, and Sly Stone by showing how comfortably they sit in the standard liberal American Studies narrative, alongside Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, and Melville. This strategy forces readers to consider seriously the music in question, but it also ignores how the existing narrative of cultural history was itself grounded in the exclusion of such forms as blues.  Is the point, then, to win admission to the Old Boys Network, or to tear it down? 

   Ross's narrative works brilliantly, but it risks overlooking how the point of much of twentieth century music was to prove that, to use a quote from John Cage that provides one of Ross's chapter titles, "Beethoven was wrong."  In other words, many of the musicians Ross studies were more concerned with blowing up the narrative of classical music history than with finding their home within it. 

   This is not meant to belittle Ross's remarkable accomplishment in the book, which I think everyone should read.  I simply wanted to register a small caveat, a reminder that even as we try to make sense of our musical past, as we make choices about how to organize what we've heard--choices that inevitably close off alternative possibilities--we also remember that we need to keep listening.  The next chord you hear may radically change the significance of the ones that preceded it.