Getting ready for The Rest Is Noise

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Getting ready for The Rest Is Noise

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1ChocolateMuse
Mar 19, 2012, 8:30 pm

So at the begining of April we begin the rebel read of The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross. I will also be reading Illegal Harmonies by Andrew Ford. But really, it doesn't have to be a 'read' as such of anything. It's just 20th century music, with historical and other context added thereto. Who's in?

If you want to dive straight in and get an absolutely wonderful overview of the whole 20th century music scene from go to whoa, here is Illegal Harmonies in its original form, as a radio series: http://www.abc.net.au/classic/content/2011/09/18/3328672.htm

(I have sadly lost the ability to listen to the above - my work computer no longer lets me listen, and my home internet won't stream it. Tragic.)

As for format, because this is a rebel read I thought it could be an undercurrent to other things, not taking the spotlight... and as such could go quite slowly, maybe a chapter per week? Which would give us time to hunt down the music and absorb it before moving onto the next. Any thoughts on that?

Also, I was thinking it might be nice if anyone who wants to could tell us on this thread about where you are with so-called 'classical' music in general, and 20th century in particular. I know there would be so many stories you guys can tell... we have at least one ex-professional pianist among us; and I'd love to know what other people play, and what their experience with classical music is. And I'm hoping there are some who haven't had much to do with it at all (sigh.. Rique was going to do this with us long ago), as well as the experts.

I'll talk about myself in another post later!

2LisaCurcio
Mar 19, 2012, 8:48 pm

Classical music--I don't know a thing about it but I know what I like. I learned to play piano as a child and can read music at a rudimentary level. I generally do not like dissonance. I prefer pre-20th century "classical" music, but there is some 20th century I like.

I like musicians who like what they do. I dislike histrionics in musicians. As in I saw Evgenny Kissin last year and just wanted to gag as he threw himself all over the piano as he played.

I know just enough about classical music to find people like Peter Schickele absolutely hysterical. And I found a new classical music comedy duo just this weekend: Igudesman and Joo. Laugh out loud funny.

I still have to get the book.

3Porius
Mar 19, 2012, 10:09 pm

STRAVINSKY.

4elenchus
Mar 19, 2012, 10:16 pm

Thanks for the Andrew Ford link, I hope to listen to that and revisit Ross's text, which I'd read a couple years back. I am a music enthusiast, but not a musician since my grammar school days (and got by on fear rather than talent). My aesthetic sensibility is punk, for good and ill.

5LolaWalser
Mar 19, 2012, 10:28 pm

Hi! I shall aim to lurk, not much of a Alex Ross fan. Classical I love, and 20th century here and there. Have a soft spot for zanies and noisemakers (Palestine Charlemagne, La Monte Young, Xenakis...)

I can read music, I play the piano, not very well, and classical guitar, even worse, but hey, it makes me happy and stops me from torturing little children.

6Porius
Mar 19, 2012, 10:30 pm

I don't know whether or not you are aware of this Ch:
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/06/stravinsky_yout.html

7beelzebubba
Mar 19, 2012, 10:36 pm

I torture my daughter by making her practice her piano. She, in turn, tortures me by complying.

Actually, she has gotten quite good. She is working on Bach's Musette. It thrills my soul to hear her play it.

9dcozy
Mar 19, 2012, 10:44 pm

Lola: I wonder what you don't like about Ross. I enjoyed The Rest is Noise, and usually like his NYer pieces when I happen to come across them.

10LolaWalser
Mar 19, 2012, 10:53 pm

I don't remember, something I read. I became a sworn enemy. I'm afraid to go rereading.

I don't think I ever agreed with any New Yorker critics, except, once, with Anthony Lane. About Popeye.

11mejix
Modificato: Mar 19, 2012, 11:37 pm

Loved this book. For a couple of years I used this audiobook to fall asleep. I wonder if I have been unconsciously programmed in any way.

13RickHarsch
Mar 20, 2012, 4:11 am

Nice, Porius, and Tango for Piano comes up on that page too

14ChocolateMuse
Mar 20, 2012, 5:16 am

Thanks to you all.

Lola, this read doesn't need to be a hymn of praise to Alex Ross.

As for me, I dutifully learned piano from age 7 to 17. My musical childhood consisted mostly of country music and hymns, such was the family taste and I knew no different. I knew very little about the big wide world of music until I had an epiphany a few years ago, since which time I've devoured all I can, but am nowhere near being any sort of expert. During said epiphany I went back to piano lessons, and am now working towards piano exams at this comparatively late age - a Certificate of Performance in November, which probably doesn't mean much to non-Australians. This piano thing is one of the biggest things in my life these days, I love it enormously.

So I guess I'd be classed as an enthusiastic amateur.

My natural taste goes first to Chopin, Schubert and Mendelssohn. I'm fascinated by Debussy and Prokofiev. Recently fell in love with Stravinsky's violin concerto. I have a thing for Poulenc. I am bored by Mozart. Bach will always be a hero. Post 1950, I know almost nothing, other than John Cage, and really it's only his 4'33" that I've 'heard'. Oh, and some of the contemporary Australians - Peter Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards, Elena Kats-Chernin, Peggy Glanville-Hicks. But my 20th century music knowledge is greatly lacking on the whole, which is one reason I'm so excited about this read.

15ChocolateMuse
Modificato: Mar 20, 2012, 6:27 am

oh and Lisa, E.Kissin's histrionics are nothing compared to Lang Lang's. Seems to me there's a rising school of young pianists who do the histrionics. To their credit, I really think it's genuine, not put on. But I think in the old days such things were trained out of musicians, nipped in the bud, while these days the masses positively encourage it. Rubinstein barely flinches in the YouTube recordings. Ditto Horowitz - and apparently Rachmaninov sat at the piano like a stone statue except for his hands. These days most of them show more of the music in the way they move - some annoyingly so, some I think actually add to the performance.

I'm interested - do you call this histrionics? (it's Bach, apologies for the non-20thcentury musical content!) http://youtu.be/Mor973ZDGcU

16RickHarsch
Mar 20, 2012, 8:33 am

Choco--do you know/like Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues?

17LolaWalser
Mar 20, 2012, 9:02 am

#7

Good on you, beelzebubba! How old is she? My brother deeply regrets the hands-off approach my parents took to his musical education.

The dreadful thing about performance is that the early period is so crucial physically, while the understanding and true love that goes with it lags behind light years. I have several friends who hated playing as children, only to return regretfully to it in their forties, when of course they have to struggle mightily to perform even at a level sufficient for private pleasure.

18A_musing
Mar 20, 2012, 9:52 am

I downloaded The Rest is Noise last night, and read some, and it seems like a reasonably well written but fairly mainstream history of the core threads of Western classical and academic music. I haven't read anything focused this much on the western canon in the 20th century, so I am in. I also download a recent book by Paul Miller (aka, DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid) Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and may look for some other music related reads.

I'm a musical Cretan, who can claim only to have failed at learning an instrument or two along the way, mostly out of a lack of motivation. But, about 15 years ago, I got involved on the board of an orchestra that performs "the music formerly known as classical", and have managed to get a pretty interesting education in that time.

Since we're throwing in some favorites, here are two with an east meets west theme:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=entlEdQ-ZMU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIwbYxKSk74

19LisaCurcio
Mar 20, 2012, 9:52 am

>15 ChocolateMuse: CM--No, not even close. I cannot find anything right now because I don't have time to watch, but when I saw Kissin he was throwing himself the length of the piano in "expressing" himself. It was so distracting I had to close my eyes. There is a difference between watching someone who feels the music and moves with it and the exaggerated movements of that recital.

20urania1
Mar 20, 2012, 5:20 pm

>12 Porius: Porius,

Sometimes I think the local upscale grocery store must have that particular Stravinsky piece programmed for my arrival. I would really like to know what is played in the store when I am not there.

21LisaCurcio
Mar 20, 2012, 5:27 pm

>20 urania1: U, imagine the poor employees if they just keep playing it over and over and over again!

22Porius
Mar 20, 2012, 10:35 pm

If I recall correctly it is Handle's Mess-I-Ah. None wisht it longer.

23ChocolateMuse
Mar 21, 2012, 12:44 am

>16 RickHarsch: Rick, I haven't heard many, but the few I have left me with more awe than love. They are amazing though.

24beelzebubba
Mar 21, 2012, 9:33 am

>17 LolaWalser: Lola, she is seven. And you are absolutely right about getting it at an early age. She's been taking lessons for about a year now, and the progress she has made is astounding. When her teacher assigned her the Musette for her recital, I wasn't sure she could learn it in time. But she's pretty much conquered it.

I started trying to teach myself roughly the same time she started taking lessons, and it's been rough-going, to say the least. I can read music, having played the saxophone since I was a kid--but the piano, that's a different beast, for sure. My main reason for wanting to learn is to be able to play Satie's Gymnopedie #1, my favorite piano piece. I still haven't mastered it, even though I've been working on it pretty much the whole time. One day...

25LolaWalser
Mar 21, 2012, 10:15 am

#24

Never give up! I've a friend who started with piano lessons at 45, never had any musical education, but he's so in love with it he's now learning Liszt's Hungarian rhapsodies. What stumps you with the Satie? As I recall, he's not so much technically difficult as... elusive, once you start playing you realise how difficult it is to control the overall impression in the slow (and he can be very slow) pieces.

Good on the little girl. Nobody normal loves discipline, but nothing helps so much as an example of it. I think that's why you see music performance at high level clustering in families--it's not just aptitude, it's the atmosphere.

26ChocolateMuse
Mar 22, 2012, 2:26 am

The worst about learning as an adult is that one's expectations so far exceed one's capabilities, especially early on. In my experience both as a learner and as a teacher of two middle-aged beginners, I think it's coming to terms with not being very good for a long time that's hardest to deal with. The rest is just constant practice.

Also, the fact that such extremely high quality music is available on tap - recordings and radio - those we hear every day are so many leagues above (most of) us that it's daunting... back in the old days, they would have heard many more amateurs than professionals, a completely opposite scene from today.

A_Musing, how does one become involved with a board of an orchestra without playing an instrument or being a musicologist? That sounds incredibly fun. Is it?

27elenchus
Mar 22, 2012, 1:14 pm

I'm also interested in A_Musing's experience on the board, and wonder if it's as fun as it sounds to me.

BTW, the Illegal Harmonies ABC presentation is pretty keen. I listened to the first episode, wasn't expecting it to be over an hour. Also, was trying to pay bills (and keep quiet while kids slept), so I missed a bunch, but what I heard was fun. Probably better as a headphone activity, I'll remember that for next time.

28A_musing
Modificato: Mar 22, 2012, 2:40 pm

They wanted a lawyer on the board (free legal advice!) and while I don't have any musical background, I did have some broader involvement in other arts, so a mutual friend of mine and the Artistic Director connected us. I was just a couple years out of law school and eager to help, and he's never shaken me since.

It is fun - it is great to go to concerts and know a lot of people there, on and off the stage, and hang out at the receptions before and afterwards with the artists. I have met, at least briefly and in a crowd, many contemporary composers and musicians (including the ones in those videos I linked to), and talked to a few of them enough so they'll stop and chat and say hello when we meet again. And I have learned a lot.

Now and then it is also quite trying. There have been many years where some degree of panic and wild grubbing was needed to close out the books at the end of the year, and on a couple of occassions my wife has winced as I (and the other board members) signed as a guarantor on a scary-sized bank loan to help get us through, though we're now old enough as an organization to have a stable of good-hearted and more deep pocketed sugar daddies and sugar mamas who will come through in the crunch if we don't abuse the relationship.

29A_musing
Modificato: Mar 24, 2012, 11:08 am

So, this morning I was reading Steve Reich's essay in D.J. Spooky's Sound Unbound, where he talks about his first experiences way back in the 60s with tape loops and about how working with the natural melodies and rhythms he found in spoken voice influenced various musical projects he did over the next 40 plus years and the way he has "discovered" and riffed off of music in speech. You can find some of his riffs right in the heart of the first movement of "Different Trains": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYnAQ-lK74A

Last night I was reading Sharron Gu's A Cultural History of the Chinese Language and its discussion about the interaction of voice, poetry, early instruments and music in the pre-Han period, the period before poetry and music really separated. A lot of folks trying to develop new technologies to sample and complement the human voice.

The comparison and the similarities of the stories make some of this real cutting edge stuff seem pretty primal and basic.

30LisaCurcio
Mar 24, 2012, 9:15 pm

Picked up the book today, but have not looked at it!

31dcozy
Mar 25, 2012, 2:16 am

Here's a an interview with Ross. He recommends five books on music. http://thebrowser.com/interviews/alex-ross-on-writing-about-music

32ChocolateMuse
Apr 1, 2012, 7:49 pm

Hi all,

Just announcing that I'll unfortunately have to delay the beginning of this read, which was meant to start yesterday in my time and today in yours. My grandfather died on Saturday and I'm heading up to Lismore tomorrow for the funeral and family affairs.

I'll let you know when we can go ahead with the read again. I know you will all understand :)

33Macumbeira
Apr 1, 2012, 8:02 pm

Sorry to hear about your loss Choc !

34Porius
Apr 1, 2012, 8:28 pm

Our prayers are with you Choc.

35MeditationesMartini
Apr 1, 2012, 10:18 pm

Yes, good thoughts and wishes to you and your family in this hard time, Rena.

36A_musing
Apr 1, 2012, 11:11 pm

I am sorry; I'll be sending the most powerful mixture of thoughts and prayers I can muster. Take care.

37tomcatMurr
Apr 2, 2012, 2:15 am

sorry for your loss choco. we are all thinking of you.

38ChocolateMuse
Apr 2, 2012, 3:12 am

You are all so kind, thank you.

39LisaCurcio
Apr 2, 2012, 7:53 am

Rena, I am sorry. Noise will wait. Wishing you peace.

40LolaWalser
Apr 2, 2012, 2:49 pm

I'm very sorry, Choco.

41baswood
Apr 2, 2012, 5:05 pm

Condolences, but chin up soon eh

42anna_in_pdx
Apr 2, 2012, 5:27 pm

My condolences Choc. Sending positive vibes your way.

43urania1
Modificato: Apr 8, 2012, 11:28 pm

So sorry Choc. Sending green thoughts your way.

44ChocolateMuse
Apr 9, 2012, 11:07 pm

Thank you all exceedingly much. I do really appreciate it.

I'm back now, and will hopefully be organised enough to get this started in the next few days. So get your ears ready...

45baswood
Apr 10, 2012, 12:11 pm

Just got it downloaded to my kindle and so I am ready to rock and roll.

46LisaCurcio
Apr 10, 2012, 12:57 pm

Cute, B--"rock and roll"

47ChocolateMuse
Apr 11, 2012, 2:06 am