Book Club: The Rest Is Noise

This is a quandary I’m facing too, since much of the music is new to me. I really like his writing style, so I’ve found that reading the chapter first makes me more interested in listening to the music.

Maybe you’ve found the perfect balance, listening to some of the music first, to give some context to the book, and then return to the music to see if I’ve gained anything from reading about it.

I have to admit that I’m still listening to Mahler and Strauss, so my listening is way behind my reading. I need to move onto Schoenberg and Stravinsky LOL.

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AHHH! Forgot about this as well. How far along are people? Is it possible to catch up? I’ll have to go through this thread.

AHHH!

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I am still on chapter 1, get your ass moving and catch up to chapter 2.

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Schoenberg is very interesting.

I started with his Variations for Orchestra (Karajan & the BPO) and it just sounded weird, like a bunch of random notes being played. But I played it a second time and it seemed to make more sense.

Then I switched to his violin concerto, played by Isabelle Faust. It’s hard to explain, but once again I got the sense that random notes were being played, but somehow they fit together and sounded like music, not noise. The piece de resistance for me was Verklärte Nacht, on the same CD, played by sextet of Faust and a hand-picked collection of her friends. Wow, is that good - that would have been a better entry point for me.

I need to read that chapter again.

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We are reading like 40 pages a week, and commenting once or twice. It’s not exactly demanding. :slight_smile:

Hopefully this week I can get started on one of my other ideas for this, which is a shared Qobuz playlist everyone can add to as they explore. Maybe. I did decide to do this during works busy season.

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Week 2: Chapter 2 “Doctor Faust” (44 pages in seven days (if you’re running behind like me, that’s 10 pages a day to finish on Sunday)).

Link to listening samples.

Discussion points to consider as you read:

What is this book about as a whole?
What is being said in detail, and how?
Is this book true, in whole, or in part?
What of it?

And some more personal reactions:

What did you read that surprised you?
What did you read that made you want to learn more?

Music:

Which pieces did you choose to listen to? Did you listen to more than one recording? What did you discover? Did you like it? Why or why not?
Did the listening clips from the author help your understanding of the pieces? How?
Do you think you will listen to more of the music from this week’s reading? Why?

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One quick comment. I didn’t really understand the differences between scales, and I wish the music samples had provided pieces using different scales so that I could compare and contrast. I had to resort to looking at Youtube videos like these:

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Seems like pretty decent resources to start figuring out whole tone scales. If you had any specific questions after those videos, I could do my best to help out.

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A big week for Schoenberg here. I’m a longtime fan of “Transfigured Night,” but the Five Orchestral Pieces are new to me and it’s nice to come to them with the Ross book as a kind of crib sheet. It’s so interesting listening to this from the vantage point of 2021 — one minute I’m thinking “Here’s modernist troublemaking” and the next minute I’m thinking “Here’s the foundation for a whole lot of movie scores.” Which I don’t think are exclusive perceptions at all.
A little stretch, topic-wise, but since we’re into Debussy now I’d like to mention “Afternoon of a Georgia Faun” by Marion Brown on ECM — another side of the coin and a really immersive experience.

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Week 3: Chapter 3 “Doctor Faust” errr… “the Dance of the Earth”. (48 pages in seven days (that’s 6.8571428571 per day)).

If you’re jealous of all the atonal fun we’ve been having, it’s only 18ish pages a day to catch us!

Link to listening samples.

Looks like we’re gonna get a bit of Bartok, some Ravel, a lot of Stravinsky this week!

Discussion points to consider as you read:

What did you read that surprised you?
What did you read that made you want to learn more?

Music:

Which pieces did you choose to listen to? Did you listen to more than one recording? What did you discover? Did you like it? Why or why not?
Did the listening clips from the author help your understanding of the pieces? How?
Do you think you will listen to more of the music from this week’s reading? Why?

Double plus points for @PaisleyUnderground catching my egregious typo!

Great insight into film scores debt to these trailblazers.

did you listen to any of the Berg pieces? they were the most approachable for me, simply as he was still a romantic, even if he had thrown out their style book.

Here are my thoughts on chapter 2…

If chapter 1 was setting the scene, chapter 2 seemed to have a bit more meat on the bone for me, as it describes how various composers started to break away from the norm. I didn’t understand the mechanics involved in using different scales, but I still got caught up in the excitement of how daring this must have sounded at the time. I feel like this is the equivalent of the late 70s and early 80s in pop music, when punk happened, much to the disdain of fans of traditional pop.

I’m not a big fan of the listening samples. I haven’t found them very helpful, and in fact the 30-60 second snippets of music seem to irritate me, as I’d have preferred them to be a little longer to give me some context of the musical piece itself, and not just that particular group of notes. Instead, I’ve listened to whole works to try to get a deeper understanding of the music.

I found some of the composers quite exciting to listen to, in particular Schoenberg. I very much enjoyed his “Verklarte Nacht” and “Variations For Orchestra”. The music is quite different from the Bach-Mozart-Beethoven that I’m used to, and it took me a while to appreciate it. But at the same time, there was a familiarity to it too, because as @enthusiast.haas mentioned, film and TV composers appear to be heavily indebted to this period, probably because the scales they used allow them to create musical tableaus or “mood pictures” (I made this term up, so I hope it makes sense to you).

Debussy definitely mastered the art of creating “mood pictures”, as I can picture swirling shapes in the clouds as I listen to his piano music. But I liked Debussy the least, because his music doesn’t inspire any excitement in me. This may sound heretical but I’ve always found Debussy to be a little boring, and I thought it might be different now that I’ve learned more about him. Unfortunately I have the same feeling of indifference towards his music, even though my newfound knowledge allows me to admire it more.

But to end on a high note, I’m extremely happy to have discovered Schoenberg, Berg and Webern through this chapter. I will be listening to more by them.

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Mood pictures. Awesome. You may want to look up “tone poem” to see if that works for you.

tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source.

-wikipedia

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LOL, yes “tone poem” works too.

But “mood picture” better described how I felt when listening to the music, because I got these weird images in my head that somehow represented insubstantial “moods” as opposed to actual objects/people/landscapes.

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Week 2 thoughts:

What did you read that made you want to learn more?

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed some of Alban Berg’s music. I always think of Schoenberg and Webern’s music first, and in general find it lacking in humanity, so skip the entire mess. Luckily with the help of the group I have rediscovered Schoenbergs “Transfigured Night”, as well as Berg’s Pieces (3) for Orchestra Opus 6.

Music:

Did the listening clips from the author help your understanding of the pieces? How?

Having suffered through music theory, I conveniently blanked out the liberal thrashings I endured while teachers tried to knock a sense of music’s structure into my thick skull. For the briefest of briefs. Here is an explanation of the standard western style major scale:

And here is a section on the lesser used scales.

The same resource has information on a lot of music’s structural components, and may (or may not) be useful. We are going to be reading about the dismantling of a system that took 600 years to build. The western classical structure we are all familiar with is based on the liturgical chant forms (with historical roots going back to antiquity of course). Bach kind of codified the fundamentals, and then the system improved, and pushed boundaries to grow up to Wagner, Mahler and Bruckner at peak romanticism. We are reading about the reaction to romanticism or as I think of it “complex lushness can go no further, what next” .

Because we are reading about a stage where a lot of long held fundamental s are cast aside, the music theory basics break down real fast. For example, although the text did not touch on it, one of the techniques Schoenberg pioneered to move past the western harmonic structure was serialism.

Serialism of the first type is most specifically defined as a structural principle according to which a recurring series of ordered elements (normally a set—or row—of pitches or pitch classes) is used in order or manipulated in particular ways to give a piece unity. “Serial” is often broadly used to describe all music written in what Schoenberg called "The Method of Composing with Twelve Notes related only to one another"or dodecaphony, and methods that evolved from his methods. wikipedia

Or, to simply give examples as @PaisleyUnderground asked for:

A piece written in fairy strict western harmonic structure - Bach Prelude in C Major.

A piece written using whole tone scale - Debussy - Reflets dans l’eau

Our next book club may need to be a history of punk music. yonks.

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As someone who has never thought about scales before, the lightbulb moment for me was when I was watching a video on Youtube yesterday and the presenter started off with a major scale, and I thought “he’s playing do-re-mi”. Or maybe it should have been “doh! re-mi” because it never occurred to me until that moment that the whole point of the song in Sound of Music was to teach the kids the major scale.

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There you go! The syllables (doh, re, mi) are called solfege. It’s a kind of musical shorthand for hearing music as you read it. Another method for shortening the intellectual part of playing music to a lizard brain level “instinct”.

One of the things that is coming up in the topic of scales that we haven’t actually addressed, is that the type of scale (major, minor, chromatic, whole tone, pentatonic) is actually referring to the pattern of intervals between the notes of the scale. quick primer on that located here.

(the doh a dear song is still being used, my four year old is learning it in preschool.)

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Thanks to @mfadio and @PaisleyUnderground for further thoughts on soundtrack music, and to @mfadio for getting me to pay more attention to Berg. I pretty much started and ended with “Wozzeck” till now. I got into the “Berg: Violin Concerto, Seven Early Songs & Three Pieces for Orchestra” album (found on Spotify) — SF Symphony with Gil Shaham and Susanna Phillips. I realize Ross has some reservations about Berg, but I agree with @mfadio about the appeal here — so much atmosphere, emotion and invention. I’ll be going back to it.

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I just got Isabelle Faust’s Berg (and Beethoven) violin concerto because I enjoyed her Schoenberg violin concerto and Verklärte Nacht so much but I haven’t listened to it yet.

I must admit that my reading progress is way ahead of my listening progress. I think I’m forever going to playing catchup in that regard, because although Ross can quite successfully devote only a single chapter to a group of composers, it takes me time to absorb their music when it’s new to me.

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Quick note: I had never heard the anecdote of Charlie Parker quoting Stravinsky in his playing.

It is mind boggling to think of the level of mastery required to just whip out a theme from a classical piece in the middle of your set because you spotted the composer having a drink.

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