The Rest is Music, Ho!

It was a curious thing to read simultaneously (one on the bus, one in the bath), both Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise and Constant Lambert's Music Ho! recently. Ross's book won the Guardian First Book award a couple of years ago and since then it has become a sort of knee-jerk reference for anyone writing about the concert music of the twentieth century who doesn't really know very much about it. It is practically impossible to attend a pre-concert talk for any contemporary music these days without hearing a quote from it. Lambert's book, written in 1934 when the prodigious composer-critic was twenty-nine, is a rather more idiosyncratic work upon whom history has been less kind, and remains largely neglected these days.

Yet both books share a great deal in common. Both books present a kind of whither classical music, an occasionally troubled state of the art address, summarising recent developments in the field. Both begin by attempting to iron out or paper over Adorno's great opposition in The Philosophy of Modern Music, between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, by positing some third composer, supposedly prior to both (Ross is just as little convincing in his argument for Strauss's influence on Stravinsky as Lambert is in his contention of Schoenberg as a Debussyist). And both effectively conclude by positing one composer, popular at the time - if rarely exactly populist - though somewhat tame in comparison to many of their contemporaries, as the great white hope for the 'future of music' - for Lambert, it is Sibelius; for Ross, John Adams. Also, both books are as clearly stained by the prevailing prejudices of their day. In the case of Music Ho! it is the creeping racism that leaves him unable to refer to either "American negro music" or even Stravinsky without some word to their supposed "savagery". As for The Rest is Noise, the taint is liberal anti-communism.

One is apt to wonder at all the references to the Faust myth in the first part of Ross's mammoth text. By the second part, a sustained attack on politically motivated music and the political use of music, one need wonder no more. For Ross, any involvement of musicians in the dirty business of politics is a pact with the devil, whether it be the Soviet "art of fear" or the various projects and initiatives associated with the Popular Front ("a shut-in, fanatical world,") and the New Deal in America. So while the Federal Arts Project is patronised as "well-meaning", the Federal Theatre Project is demonised as "too clear about its goals" because its head, Hallie Flanagan, spoke out against "art as a commodity to be purchased by the rich, possessed by the rich" (p. 306).

Throughout this chapter on American music in the thirties and forties, like some sonic HUAC, scarcely a page passes without some loaded reference to a composer's politics. So Ruth Crawford and Charles Seegar "fell under the influence of Communist ideology" (p. 296), while the political commitments of Aaron Copland are referred to in terms of "make believe" (p. 300), "dabblings" (ibid.), and "flirtation" (p. 302), as though it were all just some adolescent phase he was going through before he could emerge as a truly mature artist. The only political gesture on the part of any composer Ross seems to approve of is Stravinsky's addition of a pulse to the final chord of Oedipus Rex on the day after "Little Boy" fell on Hiroshima, supposedly for the sake of "honoring the immense military might of the country of which he was about to become a permanent citizen." (p. 327)

The liberal prejudice of Ross's book affects not just its content, but also its form. For The Rest is Noise presents us with scarcely more than a kind of Lives of the Great Composers of the Twentieth Century, with any real sense of scenes and movements, or of struggle and antipathy, largely papered over. The only struggle, for Ross, is that between the sovereign composer individual and the mass, either in the form of the public or the state. As economics and dialectics are quietly swept under the table, allow me to express the same "unease" at the thought of undergraduates relying on this expressly liberal history of modern music as Ross once expressed towards Susan McClary's Feminine Endings. This last from an article a few years ago where he really lays his conservative cards on the table, concluding that, "An explicitly political understanding of music will ... ultimately narrow music's appeal."

Perhaps the most glaring distinction between The Rest is Noise and Music Ho! is the absolute lack, in the former, of the wit so characteristic of the latter. Lambert ends, for instance, a discussion of the gramophone's "appalling popularity" by concluding that, "The loudspeaker is the streetwalker of music" (p. 173). And so I shall leave you today with a piece of Lambert's own music, albeit filtered through an even greater sonic slut: YouTube. This is from his music to Julien Duvivier's (1948) film of Anna Karenina. Lambert no doubt approached the subject with the same rather dubious exoticism in mind as animated Martin Denny's South Sea fantasies a decade later. The results are equally beguiling.

"God is opening his doors for a moment, and his orchestra is playing the fifth symphony." (Sibelius, letter to a friend, 1914)

Despite the presence of British composers David Bedford and Andrew Poppy contributing arrangements to Strawberry Switchblade's one and only (eponymous) album, it was apparently producer David Motion who lifted the horn motif from the finale of Sibelius's fifth symphony for the intro to 'Since Yesterday' (unbeknownst to Jill Bryson and Rose McDowell: "It's only afterwards we had to ask, 'Who's Sibelius then?'" Of course, it remains possible that Motion himself didn't know the source and simply took it from the end of The First Class hit 'Beach Baby' from ten years earlier).

It would seem that the theme in question was inspired by the sight, on the 16th of April, 1915, of sixteen swans taking flight ("God, what beauty!" He wrote in his diary, "They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a silver ribbon."). Deleuzians should, no doubt, appreciate that this refrain - whose 'adventure' has taken it from the fifth symphony of the world's most popular composer (in the 1930's), through the power pop of the 1970's, the New Pop of the early 80's, and finally the dance pop of Stock, Aitken and Waterman in the chorus to Sinitta's (1988) hit, 'I Don't Believe in Miracles' - was inspired initially by a (quite literal) line of flight.

The fifth symphony came at something of a turning point in Sibelius's career, following the avant-gardist dissonance of fourth symphony with its heavy reliance on the interval of an augmented fourth, or tritone (known in Bach's time as "the devil in music"). It is perhaps interesting to note that the 'modernist' fourth symphony was composed during a rare period of sobriety in the life of Siblelius, after being hospitalised for alcoholism in 1908. By the time work was afoot on the fifth, Sibelius was merrily off the wagon again and reverted to classical tonality, believing only "madness or chaos" to lie beyond the tentative chromaticism of the fourth.

It was perhaps inevitable that to renege on the modernist deal in such a way, stepping back from the brink just as Schoenberg was boldly stepping over it, would earn Sibelius his detractors. The world's most popular composer he may well have been in the 1930's, but a book Bengt von Torme's 1937 Sibelius: A Close Up) that claimed he was a greater composer than Mahler or Schoenberg would pique the anger of one of dissonance's greatest standard bearers, Theodor Adorno. 

Sibelius, wrote Adorno in a 'marginal note' published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung of 1938, was a mere 'scribbler', "If Sibelius is to be considered a good composer, then we shall have to disregard all of the criteria historically used to evaluate music from Bach to Schoenberg." Sibelius's pastoralism (inevitably, Adorno believed, a symptom of German Blut and Boden propaganda), his acceptance of the Goethe medal from Adolf Hitler in 1935, made him not just a bad composer, but a Nazi composer. But Sibelius, it would seem, was somewhat in the habit of accepting garlands without too much concern over their origin. A fault, to be sure, but perhaps one more personal than political. 

In his diaries of 1943, he explicitly condemned the "stupid prejudices" of Nazism as "utter hogwash" even as he relieved himself, as a "cultural aristocrat", of the necessity of fighting against them - only a year after this same vanity had led him to accept the foundation in Germany of a Sibelius Society (Finland and Germany were, at the time, allies in war against the Soviet Union and the Society was most likely a diplomatic request from the Finnish foreign ministry). If, then, Adorno's political argument against Sibelius is somewhat tendentious, his musicological attack relies, according to semiotician Eero Tarasti, on the "colonialist discourse" of a more or less explicit assumption of German musical superiority.

If Adorno's attacks may have largely banished Sibelius from the corridors of academic musicology, possibly even contributing to the self-doubt that prevented him from completing, or leaving any traces of, his eight symphony, and led to the silence of his later years, they could do little to tarnish his iconic status in his native Finland. Though Tarasti sees the birth of the "Sibelius cult" in Finland as early as the first performance of the Kullervo symphony in 1892, still all his references date significantly from after the publication of the fifth symphony. Completed only very shortly after the declaration of Finnish independence, it was at the very first performance that composer Robert Kajanus claimed, here Sibelius had created a distinctively Finnish style of composition, "The little that had seen the light of day before that was only a feeble offshoot of the German school containing – if I may use the expression – ethnographically inoculated material from Finnish folk music."

Sibelius's fifth symphony remains a curiously contradictory beast: a retreat from the modern whose theme would haunt popular music more than half a century after its composition, appropriated first as a hymn to the soil, and unofficial national anthem, and later, by the BBC, as the music to accompany the first images of the Apollo moon landings. "Is the bird's refrain necessarily territorial," ask Deleuze and Guattari, "or is it not already used for very subtle deterritorializations, for selective lines of flight?" The co-called 'swan' theme from Sibelius's fifth symphony seems to illustrate perfectly this seemingly paradoxical movement of the refrain. As we listen to each of the four incarnations of the melody in order (Sibelius - The First Class - Strawberry Switchblade - Sinitta), we can hear not just the stripping away of the musical context, but the gradual whittling away of its tone colour, the richness of the sound, up until its final reduction to the tinny synth part in the chorus to 'I Don't Believe in Miracles'. Music, "lays hold of the refrain, makes it more and more sober, reduced to a few notes ... no origin or end in sight . . . " 

Kaija Saariaho, Salle de Olivier Messiaen, Maison de Radio France

I have often wondered whether instrumentalists respond to the instruction, in certain modern scores, to emit sudden vocalisations, with dread or delight. In tonight's performance, by seven soloists from the French National Orchestra, these mouth noises, somewhere between those of a Clanger and a Flower Pot Man, come from the flautist, Philippe Pierlot. Amid a trickle of marimba and a thresh of almost Bernard Hermann-esque stabs from the string players, he whoops and parps away in the second of three Saariaho pieces this evening, entitled Terrestre. Monsieur Pierlot is of course far too deadpan for us to ascertain his relative enjoyment (or otherwise of this brief opportunity to exercise his larynx on stage.

Born in Helsinki, alumnus of both IRCAM and Darmstadt (where she studied under Brian Ferneyhough), Saariaho is a composer steeped in the modern French school, but with a distinctly Finnish icy severity that recalls, at times, Jean Sibelius. Sandwiched, in tonight's programme, between the summery jauntiness of Albert Roussel's Sérénades and the soupy orientalism of Debussy's Préludes (transcribed form the piano for strings, harp and flute by Anthony Girard), Saariaho's New Gates is immediately arresting in its cold, forbidding intensity. Concerned with that favourite old IRCAM trope, the gradual transformation of musical timbres, it even starts with a genuine Schoenbergian Klangfarbenmelodie, moving gently from the first rasped high cello note, to the same note played on a flute, at first more breathe than note, gradually introducing more and more tone as it takes over from the cello, and, finally, a flurry of harp glissandi in the same register.