The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Some genres have attained more popularity than others; none has true mass appeal. What delights one group gives headaches to another

Like Reich, Glass made his living outside academia, driving taxis and doing odd jobs. The two minimalists briefly formed a company called Chelsea Light Moving and eked out a wage carrying furniture up and down the narrow staircases of New York walk-ups. Glass also worked as a plumber, and one day installed a dishwasher in the apartment of the art critic Robert Hughes, who could not understand why SoHo’s composer laureate was crawling around the floor of his kitchen.

Teacher and student would have long arguments about music’s role in society; once, when Wolpe pointed out the window of his Greenwich Village studio and exclaimed that one must write for the man in the street, Feldman looked down and saw, to his ironic delight, Jackson Pollock walking by.

Cardew, for one, could go no further. In 1972, he denounced the avant-garde as a bourgeois luxury, wrote an incendiary essay titled “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism,” and set about writing simple songs in praise of Mao Zedong.

The usual political issues arose. When Penderecki produced a floridly experimental piece called 8’37”—an affair of shrieking cluster chords, sputtering streams of pizzicato, siren-like glissandos, and other Xenakis-like sounds—officialdom took a favorable view only when someone suggested that the work be retitled Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. It went on to have a successful career in the West.

No one reported anything like a seamy underside to the composer’s personality. The conductor Kent Nagano, who collaborated closely with Messiaen in his last years, was once pressed to tell some unflattering or otherwise revealing anecdote about his mentor, and all he had to offer was a story about how Messiaen and Loriod had once devoured an entire pear tart at one sitting.

“Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” wrote the French poet Charles Péguy in 1910.

The shift to talkies had created a mania for continuous sound. Just as actors in screwball comedies had to talk a mile a minute, composers were called upon to underline every gesture and emphasize every emotion. An actress could hardly serve a cup of coffee without having fifty Max Steiner strings swoop in to assist her. (“What that awful music does,” Bette Davis once said to Gore Vidal, “is erase the actor’s performance, note by note.”)

and a ballet about music itself (Revolt), in which classical music fights dance hits, gramophones rebel against their masters, critics commit suicide,

“Music really ought to have been a hermetical science, enshrined in texts so hard and laborious to decipher as to discourage the herd of people who treat it as casually as they do a handkerchief!