The purpose of this blog is to – hopefully – serve as an introduction to a vast realm of incredible music, much in the way an all-night radio station in Chicago did for me years (and years and years) ago. I understand and am comfortable with the fact that no one reads this blog, but at least it’s out there and maybe a few people somewhere (and with the internet, “somewhere” is anywhere) at some point will find it.
That right there is the mission statement for the blog.
The music to which I refer is of course that of “classical” composers in Europe and the Americas since, roughly, 1900. I have not gone further back than Dvorak, Sibelius, Mahler and Brahms, mainly because the 20th and 21st century stuff resonates with me in ways Mozart or Haydn, say, never did. It’s sacrilege, I know, but there’s also the fact that I don’t have enough time left (I’m 58) to even think about Beethoven. Even if I live to my projected lifespan, I doubt I’ll die with a solid grasp of Shostakovich or Schnittke or Bartok (composers I listen to all the time), let alone Britten, Stravinsky, et al. Time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me.
So “narrowing” the scope to the last 1.2 centuries still leaves an imponderable expanse. Many of the great composers of this period had interesting and creative careers that spanned forty or fifty years, well into advanced old age (which, as one on the cusp of his senior years, draws me to it all the more.) There are thousands of works and multiple performances of many, and much of it, frankly, is not all that interesting. Plunging in is great, but having some guidance is essential or you’ll get bored fast. One excellent way to learn about something, I feel it necessary to say, is reading, and I offer this blogpost as a reading list you might consider if you want to understand the music better. Because – and this is another reason the music resonates with me – this modern classical, as much as any art form of its era including film – reflects the immediate circumstances in which it was written, and an understanding of the social and personal context lends the music a vitality and purpose you would lose without such knowledge. Often, the context was harrowing. Take Shostakovich, for example, perhaps the greatest white musical genius of the 20th C. His biography makes his life’s work – including the dull, lesser stuff, which he wrote to appease the Man of Steel so THAT HE WOULD NOT BE MURDERED BY THE SECRET POLICE – understandable and approachable. Shostakovich created great art in a nightmare world, a world that passed from Lenin to Stalin to Khruschev and ultimately – sadly – into Breshnev (Shostakovich died in ’76). His achievements – already monumental – take on an otherworldly aura in light of that. (And I highly recommend the biography pictured with surveys on the shelf above, by a psychologist (fittingly) named Stephen Jackson from; it is another book I would consider among the best I’ve ever read on music.) Just as Samuel Barber’s and Benjamin Britten’s lives as gay men in an inhospitable, homo-sterilizing era lends a deep and varnished sadness to their music, and just as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s adolescence in Nazi Germany at the height of the war had to have influenced everything he ever did… I can not emphasize this enough: the music gains immensely from context.
So, these are the books I’ve learned a lot from over the past couple years. There are other titles out there, I know, that I might learn a lot from but that have not crossed my path, or at least not in an affordable manner. And I’m hardly done reading these. I refer to these books constantly while putting together my radio show on WSFM (ashevillefm.org).
I will the begin with the book I learned the most from, and work so on down the line. I am rating the books in terms of $ because this is America and that’s what we understand. But it’s a good measure: I have to buy this stuff, after all. The prices after the synopses, then, are, first, what I’d pay to replace the book if I had to; the second price is what a “Very Good” or better copy costs on Amazon (as of this moment, anyway…) You should keep in mind that I’m poor, living below the poverty line (and totally fine with that, thanks), so $25 is a SHITLOAD of money to for me spend on a book. And I hate to endorse Amazon, but at this point it’s sort of like buying gasoline for your car – a necessary evil.
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
(Penguin, 2007)
The Rest Is Noise is one of the really good books I’ve read on any kind of music*, and is at this point – with its bestseller status along with the author’s podcast and an annual NYC festival of the same name – as close to iconic as a book about classical music in the age of AI and cyber warfare could be. The subject matter here dovetails exactly with the music considered in Concentration Camp (late 19th century to the present) and, along with Dan Carlin’s hardcore history, is the main non-musical inspiration for this largely pointless endeavor. But the Rest Is Noise is most valuable precisely because its purpose is to put the music in a linear, historical context. One reviewer on Amazon gave it two stars, I think, complaining that there was “too much history.” That reviewer, I immediately thought, had to be an American, because in America history is just a tedious high school subject and one that, like other print-centered media, is getting dumber all the time.
Twentieth century history to most Americans is how “we” won the two World Wars, Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream Speech,” and Ronald Reagan. Well, it seems we’re making some history now, so trying to understand what Europe experienced in terms of… oh I dunno, fascism and racism and genocide might help in understanding the world we now find ourselves in, where a sort of Capitalist totalitarianism looms inescapably on the horizon. (By capital C Capitalist, I mean a completely rigged system based on weightless abstractions of the financial realm and beholden to a single motive: profit.) The rise of aggressive nationalism that birthed the first world war, the contempt for capitalism that prompted multiple revolutions (ending, for the most part, disastrously), the psychotic racial hatred and the wrenching paranoia that led to World War II and the Holocaust ARE all worth considering and understanding. History does repeat itself because there are, ultimately, a finite number of plotlines (which is why studying classic lit is, for good readers at least, important in high school), though certainly new elements and new sorts of tyrants – like Trump, a brand name sticker on a suicidal 4-year money grab – arise as evil evolves alongside technology and its increasingly frantic pace.
In The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross effectively discusses the poisonous tides that swept across Europe in his discussions of Eastern European and Russian composers like Bartok and Kodaly and Shostakovich – but he gives significant space to other storylines, interesting ones, like the importance of homosexuals in classical music (notably Britten and virtually every important American composer other than Ives), or the CIA-sponsorship of ultra-abstract music like Stockhausen’s in Germany after the war (so as not to awake another Hitler with exhilarating Romanticism like Wagner or Richard Strauss).
Of course, the subject matter – the 20th century – is still so vast that the book is necessarily an overview much of the time and some of my favorite composers are barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. It would be nice to see Ross write a longer book from any of a half dozen chapters in The Rest Is Noise. But this is an important book, one that would need to be written – or understood – before appreciating or expanding upon any of his chapter topics.
It must sometimes seem a burden for Ross, seeing as he’s the only classical music critic well-known to the point he’s read by laymen. Ross knows the technicalities and is sometimes compelled to break stuff down, but because he is such an efficient writer that is only mildly tedious to someone like me, who only wants to hear the stories and understands little-to-nothing about the technicalities.
WORTH: $75; USED VG $4.15
Alexander J. Morin (editor) The Third Ear Essential Listening Companion to Classical Music.
(Backbeat Books, 2002)
This is to me by far the best of the telephone directory-sized overviews of all of classical music. It’s got the 11,000 pages and 3-pt. font of a big city phonebook, and espite untold scores of pages on Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Mahler’s symphonies, the modern stuff is not given short shrift within such a context. There are also scores – scores – of contributors, so almost every composer in the alphabetical listings is considered by a sympathetic writer, if not an outright fan. This is more of a help than a hindrance: if you like a composer, you want to hear other things you like by her or him. This book is like The Bill James Baseball Abstract or H.G. Wells’ Outline of History to me at this point. If I could only grab one book on the way out of my burning house, this would probably be it. (That or my autographed copy of The Tall Woman by Wilma Dykeman…) Because it is 14 years old – last time I checked mine is the most recent printing – it does not include discs released since (obviously) and is frustratingly briefer on composers – like the Scandinavians Norgard, Saariaho and Rautavaara – who have been effectively canonized more recently. (Real quick, if I was asked to provide a shortlist of late 20th C. composers whose music is almost constantly entertaining and markedly genius at the same time, that would be it. Well, and Schnittke.) But works and various interpretations of them by different performers (most of which are still in print or available through Amazon) are insightfully discussed at length by people who really, really know whereof they speak.
WORTH: $40; USED VG: $15.50
Norman Lebrecht: The Companion to 20th Century Music
(Simon and Schuster, 1992)
The only famous person I’ve interviewed to date suggests Lebrecht, still going, well-past the ’92 publishing date, is regarded as a prick or asshole by some musicians and composers. He’s an Englishman, and affects a prim and somewhat creepy aura in his jacket photo, looking like a big-haired intellectual from a ’70s Playboy despite the Clinton-era first edition. His writing follows suit. The famous person says that Lebrecht focuses on dirt and scandal or disgrace and leaves important things out of his brief entries in this book as well as his terse writing on his website that amount to mistruth. I suspect that’s exactly right based on an example or two I know more about than Lebrecht writes, but the book is an invaluable reference because of the people he writes about, who are otherwise barely- or unknown to laypeople. (I’m just going to go with the “lay” concept for now). I think there’s upwards of twenty composers whose work I nowadays devour that I’d never heard of until Lebrecht’s book crossed my path at a used book store. He writes longer essays about major composers, and his pages on Bartok, Ives, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten, in particular, are forceful arguments for the greatness of each. He is an excellent writer in terms of saying a lot with a few words and he is pugnacious (“flippant” is how someone panned him in an Amazon pan), which is refreshing, to me. He’s sort of like a boxing reporter writing about the fringes of clasical music. Stuff he doesn’t particularly like – Philip Glass, e.g. – he disembowels with a swipe or two. (He has better regards for Steve Reich, which may give you an idea of Lebrecht’s vibe.) There must be several thousand entries, and I have discovered insane amounts of cool music by checking out Youtube while reading his dry and/or caustic blurb-bombs. A useful barometer: 140 words on Galina Ustvolskaya. In all the other books on the shelf, she is mentioned only once, and there in a series, with commas on either side of her. [I have ordered a book Lebrecht published in ’97 called Who Killed Classical Music?: Maestros, Managers, and Corporate Politics but (obviously) can’t comment on it yet…]
WORTH: $25; USED LN $.01
Jan Swafford: The Vantage Guide to Classical Music
(Vantage, 1992)
This one devotes 170 of its 520 pages to the 20th Century and is probably the most engaging-to-the- layman book on the list. Swafford, a composer himself, is able to write enthusiastically and amiably about music from all seven centuries covered in his overview. (I’m guessing, because I never read about anything from the time before Dvorak, Mahler, and Sibelius, and Satie and maybe Brahms. I don’t know why, but music from before that – even Mozart, Haydn, does nothing for me. Nothing – I turn it off immediately when I hear it on the radio. I guess you should bear that in mind. He has, in many of his four or five paragraph considerations of major modern composers, a lot of biographical material I’ve not encountered elsewhere, so it’s short but engaging.
WORTH: $4; USED VG $3.76
Harold C. Schonberg: Lives of the Great Composers
(Norton: 1997 (3rd Edition))
[Note: NOT to be confused w/ Lives and Times of the Great Composers or Love Lives of the Great Composers or (ewww) Sex Lives of the Great Composers…]
This was written by the longtime senior music critic for The New York Times, back in the Vincent Canby-era (1960s and ’70s), and Schonberg’s is sort of like Vincent Canby’s writing on films: intelligent but not to the point of intellectual, insightful, informative. Twentieth Century-wise, it has excellent chapters on Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and Bartok (in that sequence), but I think I like Schonberg’s writing about the table-setters for modernism – Dvorak, Bruckner, Mahler and Scriabin among them – most in this book. No mention of Gloria Coates…
WORTH $5; USED VG $4.76
Paul Griffiths: A Concise History of Avant-Garde Music; From Debussy to Boulez
(Oxford University Press, 1978)
Griffiths has a more recent book, also from Oxford University Press, with a 3rd edition published in 2011, but A) from reviews, it seems as though the focus is on the more abstract composers and experimental composers who trace their lineage from Schoenberg (whose 12-tone works do not engage me AT ALL at this point) through the Darmstadt School and Cage to Luigi Nono and Berio and their ilk (much of whose work I do like, but not THAT much…), and B) it is not available at a price I can afford right now. I got a used library copy of A Concise History for a couple bucks… As the title suggests, this is a short book that covers the period I outlined above up to 1978, and it is about as long in sections on Boulez and Darmstadt as I care to read.
1978 is an unfortunate end date for a consideration of the avant-garde. The late ’70s and early ’80s marked a turning point in classical music, away from abstraction (or unlistenability) for its own sake and towards – or back to – tonality. The composers responsible – like Part, Gorecki and Rautavaara – are not discussed in this book. Which is not to say there wasn’t a lot of great music written by people – like Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman (NOT to be confused with Milton Babbit, the one famous for the famously smug and condescending “I don’t care if the public likes it” line), Ligeti and Messiaen – who were considered irrevocably avant-garde in their times. Unfortunately, only Messiaen is explored at any length in this book, and ALFRED SCHNITTKE IS NOT EVEN MENTIONED. Most interesting to me (if not exactly valuable, per se) are the passages that consider Bela Bartok’s role in the move towards the exceedingly challenging music with which Griffiths is obsessed, and the many photos and illustrations (some of the scores of composers like Ligeti, Messiaen, Berio and Stockhausen are visual masterpieces in their own rights…) laced throughout.
[P.S. I’m not crazy about the Darmstadt-related stuff, particularly Boulez, but I am open-minded. If anyone would care to recommend a Boulez piece that wouldn’t bore me shitless, you are welcome to comment on this blog post. As for Stockhausen, well, I may work my way backwards from his Licht operas of relatively recent times, which, I was happy to learn after begrudgingly clicking on a Youtube link (“I might as well at least check it out before I pan it…”), are beautiful and seem to be a perfect soundtrack for the new world order.]
WORTH: $6; USED VG $.01
Robert Layton (ed.) The 2009 Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music
(Penguin, 2009 duh)
Vastly inferior in scope to the Third Ear Guide listed up top, it is a little newer and does include recordings not listed in the older tome. The writing is good and from authors well-versed in their subjects. The advice I’ve taken from it has been good. I got mine for free, so…
WORTH: $2.50; USED VG: $24.47 (in other words, pass…)
Ted Libbey: The NPR Listener’s Encyclopedia of Classical Music
Workman, 2006)
As you might imagine from the cover and the NPR affiliation, this one is big font and packs the bite of a toilettop urn full of potpourri… It is worthwhile for me nevertheless, because it has entries for musical terminology that I don’t know and can often not pronounce, on the history of various instruments and forms, and it many, many entries for performers and conductors, as opposed to just composers. It skims the 20th Century but it alights on several people I didn’t know much about…
WORTH: $2.50; USED VG: $.15 (G is $.01)
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So, that’s my beginner’s library. These books will help you better understand the music that is played on Concentration Camp, which is essentially the funeral music for the end of Western Civilization. Because it did end there – Western Civilization, I mean – between the World Wars and the rise of hyper-capitalism and genocidal communism, right there on the continent (Europe) that begat it. A future post will look at some websites (besides Wikipedia, which is of course UTTERLY INVALUABLE and to which I donate annually) that have been very helpful.
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*The best music books I’ve ever read without regard to genres would include Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues; Etta James’ autobiography Rage to Survive; Blues and the Poetic Spirit by Paul Garon, Stephen Calt’s Skip James biography I’d Rather Be the Devil; Leroi Jones’ Black Music (about the early ’60s free and post-bebop jazz scenes), and Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Over Again about postpunk.
Concentration Camp 