The 24th! We’ve got so much to do!
As a matter of fact, we could all read the preface and listen to the works discussed prior to the 24th.
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Week 1: Preface and Chapter 1. (39 pages in seven days)
Link to listening samples.
Discussion points to consider as you read:
(Taken from “How to Read a Book”. Summary here.
- 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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Holy cow, I forgot how much I dislike German opera.
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LOL, I was saving that line for my first book report!
No offense to my friends in Germany, but I’ve come to the realization that I only like opera sung in Italian, which is almost certainly an intellectual limitation of myself.
I’ve owned Der Rosenkavalier for over 30 years and have a listen every decade to see if I’ve changed my mind. I haven’t.
On the other hand, I’ve been enjoying Strauss’ tone poems, Don Juan and Don Quixote. I found a recording by Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic on Amazon HD and was listening to that as I read chapter 2.
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This. This here. This here is why I opted out of this particular activity. I listened to the first few chapters of music…. 
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If you can, I’d suggest that you try reading the book (if you haven’t already) because it is both interesting and readable. And like me, you can choose to read the sections about opera without listening to the music. There’s a lot of non-operatic music discussed in the opening chapters too.
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I read all of the sample on apple books. I am not opposed to reading it, I just got bored with their relationship. And I honestly didn’t retain anything else. Does it get more interesting after that? I think the sample ended in the middle of the first chapter. Which was odd. I put on the music to see if that helped. It…… didn’t.
Not to be contrary but I’m quite fond of German opera - or, more specifically, some of it. I’m not sure I’m enough of a fan to take on Alex Ross’s Wagnerism but some of Wagner’s operas, especially the Ring cycle, or some sections of them, are sublime (e.g. the end of Walküre, some of the overtures and preludes). @PaisleyUnderground, I hear you about Rosenkavalier.
It’s a popular choice but Tristan und Isolde is one of my favorite pieces of music. It made for what was probably one of the greatest experiences of art I’ve had when I saw it live a few years ago at the Met with Simon Rattle conducting and Nina Stemme in the role of Isolde. It was also a great production. (This Met video is from the matinee performance of the same production).
My wife prefers opera sung in Italian. I managed to convince her to see The Flying Dutchman with me last year. She quite liked it but isn’t entirely sold on Wagner. It was the last live music we saw before we went into lockdown in NYC.
I’m a bit behind on The Rest is Noise; we just moved this week (every muscle hurts, I’m getting too old for this), and today I’m getting my headphone corner all set up. Looking forward to some good tunes and reading tonight!
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I should try some Wagner operas, as I do like his music. And maybe I need to see something live to get myself over that hump.
And to repeat what I said in a previous post, I’m not against German opera specifically, I don’t like opera in any language but Italian *. That is obviously my shortcoming.
* The one exception is Mozart’s The Magic Flute, because I love the music so much, so maybe I should give Wagner a chance.
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I’m only a few chapters in, and I’m finding it interesting, but then I’m primarily a fan of the period from Bach through Beethoven, so a lot of this is new to me. Through advice from my “mentors” on the Classical Music thread, I’ve discovered over the last few months that I love Mahler, so to me, reading this book is just an extension of that music discovery experience.
The first few chapters seem to be setting the scene for the rest of the book. The first chapter is very much setup, and I’m guessing that he chose Mahler and Strauss for the first chapter because this period of time was the tipping point for when “popular music” morphed into “classical music” (i.e. the audience diminished) and those two composers were at the tail end of “popular music”.
Anyway, I got it from my local library, so it didn’t cost me anything but my time.
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Well said. Who doesn’t enjoy a nice Nibelungen?
There is a giant world of things to be discovered, it is rarer and rarer for me to feel guilt at not forcing myself into appreciation of something. Although I also find my tastes change over time, exposure and age. Which is why I will still give things a shot I used to dislike. Such as brussel sprouts.*
I should have been clear and said "I am not enjoying listening to “Salome” or to “Wozzeck”. I did quite enjoy the Mahler selections, and the Elgar mentioned, which I was not familiar with.
They are totally different than they used to be, and it isn’t just that my tastes matured
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Well, it does purport to cover a century of music, so it seems there is a high likelihood of there being some different things to listen to.
But yeah, if I judged it by the Strauss piece, I wouldn’t read it either.
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First week reading:
Although (as covered) Salome did not suit me, I found the depiction of the events that surrounded the premier fascinating. It is difficult for me to imagine a cultural event of that level, in our increasingly fragmented communities and society, the closest I can remember in my life may have been the release of a Harry Potter book or seemingly universal disappointment in the final season of “Game of Thrones”.
Does anyone think that any kind of music could cause a cultural reaction today of the the level that Salome did?
The other thing that stuck out was the interesting nature of the American musical audience following the European composers with a precursor to Beatle-Mania. As @paisleyunderground mentioned, This does seem to be setting the stage for a story of how “classical” diverged from “popular” and what came after the split. If the writing stays this entertaining and educational, I’m excited for this summer.
As far as the music goes, I found the samples on the authors site to be very helpful in understanding the effect of the two scales, as I had trouble picking it out of the very dense score, and my musicians analyst ears are more out of practice than I thought they were. Highly recommended to keep his page open in a browser as you go through the text.
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I agree - I suspect that such moments of widespread cultural connection are indeed rare these days. It’s hard to come up with further examples beyond the ones you gave. Figures for the declining number of tv shows’ viewers would seem to bear out this trend.
Much of this has to do with the immediate availability of so many forms of cultural production, of course, and I think it’s worth keeping in mind that the strong reaction to Salome owed something to the ways in which cultural forms were accessed and available in 1906. Obviously, the rise of mass culture was well underway at that time, and while the gramophone had been invented more than a generation earlier, I suppose that most people still experienced music only through live performances, which may have made the cultural significance of a single performance all the greater.
I wonder if, to some extent, the constructed distinction between “popular” and “classical” music in the years that followed owed something to the divergent ways in which people could access and experience music, either as something to be enjoyed in a live performance or through the novelty of a recording or a broadcast on the radio.
Also, I don’t mean to be ungenerous but I can’t help but wonder if the performance of Salome was quite the significant event that Alex Ross would have us believe it was. How many people were in the audience that night? How many in the city of Graz, let alone Austria or the world beyond, were aware of what was going on? Clearly it mattered a great deal to those who cared about these things - just as it should matter to us today, looking back - but I’d be keen to read more about the reach and popular appeal of this kind of music at that time (the reference to Wagner’s Ring making the front page of the NY Times on three consecutive days is a useful way of indicating the power of these cultural events - I guess I’m saying that more of this kind of information would be welcome).
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I’m enjoying the book a lot.
Similar to watching a Ken Burns documentary that covers a vast subject area, I think we have to read a book like this with the understanding that it can only dive so deep before moving onto a different topic.
The downside is that you end up wondering about a bunch of things that don’t get answered (like @Tchoupitoulas’s question about the actual global impact of live performances) but I never would have asked those questions if I hadn’t read the book (or watched the documentary) in the first place, and I can then read something else to get that extra detail after my interest has been piqued, whereas I might have found the more detailed book overwhelming or boring had I started with it. The upside is that if a chapter focuses on something that doesn’t interest me, I know that it will be swiftly moving onto another topic in no time.
I wasn’t sure where that first chapter was going as I was reading it, but in hindsight, after having read a few more chapters, I’ve realized my brain has been using it as a reference point as I’ve been learning about the changes after that time. It reminds me of many streaming shows on Netflix etc where you watch a couple of episodes and wonder why people have been raving about it, and then you reach episode 3 or 4 and it all comes together.
Another aside, reading the book also reminds me of the NFL “coaching trees” where a composer will have students who become successful composers and then have their own students, and each generation of composer builds on what they have learned, but also coming up with something new.
I have to admit I haven’t been using the audio samples, mainly because I’ve been reading in bed. I have been listening to various works by the mentioned composers, and I’ve found that knowing more about the composers and/or works has helped me enjoy them. I’m not sure if this is optimal, but I sometimes listen to something referred to in a previous chapter while I’m reading about a different composer, but that’s worked out pretty well so far.
As previously mentioned, I’ve tried listening to highlights of Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier and they weren’t for me. But I’ve discovered that I really like Richard Strauss’ instrumental works, particularly Don Quixote and Don Juan (I’m listening to the performance by Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic as I type). I’ve also enjoyed Previn’s recording of orchestral music from Strauss’s operas. So as a musical discovery project, this book has already been a major success after one chapter.
I’ve got a feeling that I will be more interested in the music itself than what made that music groundbreaking, so my book club comments are more likely to be along those lines.
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The music theory in the book is over my head but I’m enjoying it greatly for the historical context, evocation of themes and emotions in the music, and of course the hot gossip and anecdotes about these eccentric modernists. Mahler’s 8th (Leonard Bernstein version) has been my big listen-along pleasure so far.
About the popular impact of these performances in their time, it would be hard to rate it exactly but it does seem like a particular opera, novel, or stage play could move the cultural needle much more in the not so distant past. Similar to a new Beatles album in the 60s? A new video game now? Somewhere in there, I think.
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I’m now almost through the second chapter and am getting into the groove of the book. I’m enjoying it quite a bit; I’m with @enthusiast.haas when it comes to being lost with the musical theory and enjoying the gossip. I’m glad to see that the author has provided more of a grounding in the historical context, and I’m finding the most enjoyable aspect of the book, so far, to be the vivid way in which Ross sets the cultural scene in Vienna and Paris.
I very much like his approach to telling the story through a kind of collective biography, offering us vignettes about composers and others in their circles, and then weaving them in and out of the narrative. I’m getting comfortably familiar with the cast of characters.
It should be fun to see where things go from here, although it doesn’t seem hard to see where things are going. In the first 50 pages Ross has possibly introduced us to future shift in musical creativity from the old European centers to the US. It seems as though Vienna is being set up as a cultural capital on the precipice of a catastrophe; at the same time, Paris seems to be edging towards a related tragedy, one in which the promise and optimism of Debussy’s artistic scene is snuffed out. All this is fine, on the surface. But I worry about the dangers of teleology in distorting history - in this case, of going back and writing the history of previous time period in light of what happened subsequently (e.g. Hitler’s portentous appearance in the third paragraph of the first chapter).
How are you guys listening to the music? Are you listening to it as you read about it? Or before or after? I’m thinking I might start doing so in advance of reading each chapter, and then going back to it afterwards. For as excellent a writer as Alex Ross is, I find some of his writing about music to be far too opaque. I realize it must be fiendishly difficult to translate music into words. But I read some of his descriptions and have no idea what something is supposed to sound like, as with this sentence on p. 56 in the paperback edition of the book re, Schoenberg’s Second Quartet:
“The strings dwell of sustained chords, most of which can be named according to the old harmonic system, although they have been torn from the organic connections of tonality and move like a procession of ghosts.”
I suppose my point here is that his descriptions are probably evocative only for those already very familiar with the music.
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A sustain chord would be a chord (group of notes in relation to each other) played on separate instruments sustained so that the chord can be heard as a whole. Think of a choir where the bass sing a note, the tenors sing a bit higher, the altos a bit higher, and the sopranos sing the same note as the bass. In musical notation this could be a C note in bass and soprano, E in tenors and G in Altos, making a major chord.
What I just did was name a chord in the old harmonic system. In the system most of us feel comfortable with in our ears (thanks Bach) the 12 note scale is related to each other through its harmonic properties. There are rules to follow to make things sound certain ways in the western musical canon (minor chords are for horror movies).
When Schoenberg wrote, he discarded most of these rules, “tearing organic connection” and without their foundation in harmony, the chords are less grounded, thus moving like ghosts.
Hope that made any sense. I’m still on my first cup of coffee.
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I have been reading slowly, and almost done with chapter 1. I found the narrative quite good, especially for someone with little knowledge of classical music and the composers not named Beethoven or Mozart.
The framing of events of the time, while a bit brief provided a good context for the darkness that would become WWI, Great Depression, and WWII.
I tried to follow the music, unfortunately the iBooks version does not indicate the correct page numbers, or provide links within the text. I was a bit lost until after I read a few pages to piece the sample with the page.
Good read so far, and will be catching up soon with chapter 2.
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I didn’t see this as I have been off the forum for alittle bit, but buying the book now and gonna catch up so I can be part of this!
Looks very good and excited to see what it is all about!
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