The rest is noise
These are modest claims and Ross realizes classical music will never regain the popularity it had in 1900s Europe or even 1950s America, when Leonard Bernstein regaled a radio audience every week with the splendors of Mahler or Copland. But I am glad to be more than modest and say “The Rest Is Noise” is the biggest cultural boost classical music could hope to receive. With perpetual grace and excitement, Ross reanimates music buried in history and super-obscure record stores, and allows us to feel just how contemporary it can be. Let your heart curdle with thoughts of the unrelenting nightmare in Iraq, and the men responsible for it. Then play the splintering choral work “Le Soleil des eaux,” by Boulez, based on poems by René Char — “River with an indestructible heart in this mad prison-world, keep us violent” — and you may never again say you don’t understand atonal music.
“For now, the art is like the ’sunken cathedral’ that Debussy depicts in his Preludes for Piano — a city that chants beneath the waves,” Ross concludes. After reading “The Rest Is Noise,” and having literally listened my way through it, I can feel that city chanting now. Stravinsky’s beats are pounding in my head; Ligeti’s spare piano lines are sailing through my heart. On my iPod the other day, I was listening to Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2 on a crowded streetcar. As the violins rushed off in every direction, and the cello drove them madly on, I suddenly had the most profoundly clear and terrifying vision that nothing in the world made sense. Experiencing sheer chaos in the burning tunnel of Bartók’s music, I felt utterly alive.
Cuando yo sea mayor quiero escribir artículos como los de Alex Ross en el New Yorker o éste en Salon. Pero, como ya he dicho muchas veces, ya soy mayor, y prácticamente tengo la edad a la que se consagraron dos de mis dos “héroes” (y uno de ellos no me quiso admitir en su curso). Al menos puedo compartir el entusiasmo que transmite el último párrafo.
La reseña en el NY Times es menos apasionada, más crítica. Más innecesaria. El primer capítulo del libro de Ross. Y cómo adquirirlo con un 30% de descuento. Si me hubieran dejado convertirme en doctor este mes (tal vez este mismo viernes o el lunes que viene a nivel oficial) y tuviera la holgura económica aparejada, caía fijo…
[Note to myself: Alex Ross. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Book Store, November 19, 7 P.M.]
[Descubro que Ross se licenció de Harvard. Como tantos escritores del New Yorker y guionistas de las mejores temporadas de Los Simpson. Es bonito pensar las vidas profesionales tan interesantes que tendrán tal vez tus estudiantes, aunque (o precisamente porque) ya uno no se haga demasiadas ilusiones con la propia. Mejor que el resto sea ruido y no silencio]
