The background notes from the 20th century

FEW writers can write stirringly about both Johannes Brahms and Sonic Youth. But New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, 39, has spent much of his career fighting the idea that classical music exists in an airtight room high above the rest of the culture.

Which makes his hefty new book, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century,” published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a welcome arrival. The book begins with George Gershwin arriving at the Viennese home of Alban Berg, who tries to put the uncomfortable “Rhapsody in Blue” composer at ease with, “Mr. Gershwin, music is music.”

Writes Ross: “Ultimately, all music acts on its audience through the same physics of sound, shaking the air and arousing curious sensations. In the 20th century, however, musical life disintegrated into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon.”

The book then drops back to move from the Austrian fin de siecle, Weimar Berlin, the America of Ives and Ellington, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Britten’s Britain and the ‘60s avant-garde on to Minimalism, the West Coast mavericks and the rise of John Adams.

Ross tries to put the music in context with wars, politics and pop movements whenever he can, and to highlight moments of unexpected fusions.

We spoke to Ross -- who grew up a rock-free child in Washington, D.C., later programmed a 20th century classical show on the Harvard radio station and was hired by the New York Times as a stringer in 1992 -- by phone from his Manhattan apartment.

Why does classical music from the last 100 or so years -- unlike the visual art from the same period -- remain what you call “this obscure pandemonium on the outskirts of culture”?

It’s had a struggle to find an audience, especially compared to other art forms. The first blasts of Modernism in painting and literature and so on all caused scandals: Audiences rebelled at first, but they quickly caught on, and Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for $100 million a canvas. The esoteric has become popular in these other art forms, and that hasn’t really happened in classical music.

Even Francis Bacon’s paintings have been domesticated, while a lot of contemporary and experimental music continues to shock people.

What happens when you put a bunch of people in a room and ask them to make sense, collectively, over a fixed span time, of something like Schoenberg’s “Five Pieces for Orchestra”? It’s just not the same as putting an abstract painting in a gallery and asking gallery-goers to make sense of it. A concert is a crowd experience, and crowds have minds of their own.

And dissonance simply has a stronger effect on the psyche than abstraction in painting or stream of consciousness in literature, because sound is a physical phenomenon, it shakes the air and enters your body. I don’t think composers have always appreciated how acute the effect of dissonance can be.

But these effects are very familiar in other contexts: What may cause bewilderment in the concert hall makes perfect sense in the movie theater behind a horror film or science-fiction film, in movies that have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. Once you find the right psychological context for these sounds, they no longer have the same alienating effect. And of course Stanley Kubrick helped himself to some of the finest works of Ligeti in “2001,” “The Shining” and “Eyes Wide Shut.”

I think these challenging 20th century works are seeping slowly into the repertory. It takes 50 or 100 years for the repertory to accept the new.

Given the unease a lot of people feel, what drew you to the 20th century as a subject?

For me, it contained some of the most thrilling stories in music history and an unparalleled cast of characters for a writer who loves not just music but cultural and political history as well.

My aim in this book is to use history to shine a light on the music, to show where the music came from, what is was up against, what it was reacting to, and thereby to make some of the choices composers make more clear. Once you see the music in the context of the incredibly dramatic historical circumstances, it begins to make a lot more sense.

Is it fair to say that 19th century music is essentially narrative and 20th century music is trying to do something else, or to reflect the fragmented narratives we get in Modernist literature?

A lot of 19th century music is about “the adventures of a theme.” You recognize a theme, and then you start to hear its transformation; a second theme comes along, they start to interact, and you hear a story unfolding. Twentieth century music, a lot of it is about music as landscape, music as texture, sonic events one after the other. In a lot of it, rhythm comes into play, as opposed to melody.

But a really important thing I want to get across is that the 20th century isn’t a century of dissonance and difficulty from end to end. I talk about that music and find it exciting in a lot of ways, but the 20th century also produced some of the more sheerly, purely beautiful music that’s been written in all of musical history, beginning with the late Romantics, Strauss and Rachmaninoff, but also wartime postwar music, like the “Quartet for the End of Time” by Messiaen. I think you can take anyone off the street and play them the final movement and their jaw will drop and they’ll go into a trance. It’s just overpoweringly beautiful music.

And a lot of the Minimalists’ music, in its relentless way, can be really beautiful: It takes the fundamentals of harmony, the building blocks, and makes them new and contemporary and American, in the case of Steve Reich and Philip Glass -- opens up this whole new world of beauty. It’s a century of extreme beauty as well as of extreme noise.

As you discuss in your book, composers have often looked to popular music and folk melodies, snatches of atonalism show up in Hollywood scores, and bands like the Velvet Underground and Radiohead borrow from classical music. Why do the audiences not seem to cross over as much as the musicians do?

That’s kind of a long-standing American disease, this need to define high art as not only something distinct from popular culture but as the opposite of it, the antithesis of it, the overcoming of it. Concert halls were built, from the late 19th century on, as bastions to ward off the vulgar hordes. You enter this space marked out for a sublime experience and not for anything vulgar. While a little earlier American concerts were full of crazy combinations of vaudeville songs, opera arias, string quartets and bands, in the latter part of the 19th century we became really intent on separating these things. It happened again after the Second World War.

But I’m fascinated by the periods where the barriers do break down. The ‘20s and ‘60s were great periods for that, with unexpected meetings of minds.

What’s the role of the West Coast in all this?

There are two moments in the story where California becomes almost the center of it. One is during the late 1930s and Second World War, where the emigres come to Los Angeles: Stravinsky and Schoenberg are living about eight miles from each other, both on streets above Sunset Boulevard -- though they don’t actually meet during this period. Stravinsky was the great assimilator and adapter, who absorbed all these strains of music around him, while Schoenberg remained the same man he’d always been despite some rather pathetic attempt to write film scores in Hollywood and other kinds of popular pieces. His aesthetic was too pure to be put across to the American mainstream.

And yet he had a really interesting career as a teacher and had an effect on composers like John Cage and Lou Harrison, who went off in totally different directions but were inspired by the purity of his spirit and the integrity of his character. He was such a remarkable man he sort of singed everyone who brushed against him.

And then the Bay Area: They were creating music no European music could have imagined. It’s different from anything that had come before, whether Harry Partch’s music for homemade instruments, tuned to scales of his own devising, or Cowell’s experiments in all different kinds of directions.

It was in Northern California that Minimalism begins, with La Monte Young elongating tones and then Terry Riley takes them and pushes them toward tonality and then starts a regular rhythm going and that becomes “In C,” the first Minimalist piece.

And then Steve Reich, a New Yorker, is studying at Mills College, is playing at the premiere of “In C,” and is inspired to take it to the next stage and moves back to New York and writes some of the first really classic Minimalist pieces. So it’s very much a California invention. Whether it has to do with wide-open spaces and limitless horizons is a matter of speculation. But it does come from the multicultural context: Indian music was very important for La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and Steve Reich studied African music. These were just not high priorities for East Coast composers at the time.

In California, people were kind of left alone. Despite the presence of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, there wasn’t a mentality of imitation. People wandered off in their own directions.

I feel like there was a problem that was solved in California: After the invention of new sounds and atonality and the musical revolutions that happened after that, people asked, “Is there a way we can go back to the more familiar tonal chords without it being an exercise in nostalgia, without being haunted by the past?” It was solved in California, with Minimalism. It was the last great revolution in the 20th century, and in a way it was a spectacular revolution, because it turned into a popular phenomenon.

For me, the book tells a rather dark story until it arrives in California. Then it’s like the sun comes up. For whatever reason, in California composers seem to free themselves of various historical shadows and anxieties and obsessions.

scott.timberg@latimes.com