The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Alex Ross
period to “commuters who emerge baffled from the subway, peering in all directions to ground their location.” Some adopted the strategy of avant-garde assault, firing off dissonances and percussive timbres that outdid the most unusual sound combinations of Stravinsky and the Viennese. They were dubbed the “ultra-moderns.” Others aimed to ingratiate themselves with the concert-going public, garnishing opera and symphony with dollops of jazz. On the other side of the shaky popular-classical divide, young Broadway masters like Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin copped devices from grand opera and modern music, on their way to creating a new type of through-composed music theater. They, too, were part of Manhattan’s “modernist marketplace,” as Oja calls it. Meanwhile, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, and Paul Whiteman, among others, were determining the fundamentals of the art of jazz. Almost all the above-named were born in the years just before or just after 1900, and they would dominate American music for decades to come.
Edgard Varèse, chieftain of the ultra-moderns, later recalled: “I became a sort of diabolic Parsifal, searching not for the Holy Grail but the bomb that would make the musical world explode and thereby let in all sounds, sounds which up to now—and even today—have been called noises.”
Varèse, born in 1883, came to New York from the Paris avant-garde, where he patronized some of the same occult Rosicrucian gatherings that had intrigued Debussy and Satie. After writing for a time in a style that evidently fell somewhere between Debussy and Strauss—his early scores were subsequently destroyed in a fire—Varèse took an interest in Italian Futurism and its “art of noise.” In 1915, having been released from the French army on medical grounds, he decided to try his fortunes in New York City. There, he fell in with a cosmopolitan group of artists, both native and expatriate, who were forging a distinctively American avant-garde, visceral in impact and exuberant in tone. Among them were Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, who made art from everyday objects and eroticized the machine. The American critic Paul Rosenfeld, an orotund advocate of avant-garde music in the twenties and thirties, identified these artists as avatars of “skyscraper mysticism,” by which he meant a “feeling of the unity of life through the forms and expression of industrial civilization, its fierce lights, piercing noises, compact and synthetic textures; a feeling of its immense tension, dynamism, ferocity, and also its fabulous delicacy and precision.”
Varèse’s music owes much to the cruel harmonies and stimulating rhythms of the Rite, but any trace of folklore or popular melody has been surgically excised. His first major American work was, appropriately, Amériques, or Americas, a gargantuan orchestral movement composed between 1919 and 1922. It echoed the sounds and rhythms of New York along the Hudson River and around the Brooklyn Bridge—the noise of traffic, the wail of sirens, the moaning of foghorns. The orchestra consisted of twenty-two winds, twenty-nine brass, sixty-six strings, and a vast battery of percussion requiring nine or ten players. Like Schoenberg in his early atonal period, Varèse broke down language and form into a stream of sensations, but he offered few compensating spells of lyricism. His jagged thematic gestures, battering pulses, and brightly screaming chords seem to have no emotional cords tied to them, no history, no future.
An unexpected thing happened when Varèse offered his ultraviolent music to the public: the public liked it. Or at least was diverted by it. Leopold Stokowski, a conductor of insatiable curiosity and impeccable showmanship, presented Amériques with his deluxe Philadelphia Orchestra in 1926, and the following year he programmed the equally formidable Arcana. Those concerts took place at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia and at Carnegie Hall. There was much delighted press coverage of the New York Fire Department siren that appeared in the percussion section of Amériques. Cartoonists had a field day. Varèse acquired a patina of society glamour, becoming, in Oja’s phrase, the “matinee idol of modernism.” In fact, in a delightful twist of fate, the moodily handsome composer had already been cast in bit parts in several silent movies, including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which he plays a nobleman who kills his wife with a poisoned ring.
Even bigger headlines greeted George Antheil, a native of Trenton, New Jersey, who made it his mission to become the next Stravinsky, or failing that, the next Ornstein. Antheil first won fame in postwar Paris, presenting works with such titles as Airplane Sonata and Sonata Sauvage. Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and other modernist writers admired him, although Stravinsky was unimpressed. One concert occasioned a Rite-style riot at the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées, although it turned out that the brouhaha had been staged for the benefit of the film director Marcel L’Herbier, who needed a wild crowd scene for his thriller L’Inhumaine.
In 1927 Antheil brought his act to Carnegie Hall, offering a program that managed to be jazzy and ultra-modern in equal measure: first, W. C. Handy’s orchestra played A Jazz Symphony in front of a painting of a Negro couple dancing the Charleston, the man grabbing the woman’s buttocks; then ten pianos, industrial-size electric fans, a siren, and assorted other noisemakers were rolled onstage for the Ballet mécanique, which aped Les Noces. Halfway through the latter piece, the composer-critic Deems Taylor caused universal merriment when he attached a handkerchief to the top of his cane and waved it in a gesture of surrender. “Expected Riots Peter Out at George Antheil Concert—Sensation Fails to Materialize” was the headline in one paper the next day. Antheil ended up making a living in Hollywood, writing scores for, among other films, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Plainsman and The Buccaneer.
A gap had opened up between the ideal of modernism as the antithesis of mass culture and the reality of America as a marketplace in which absolutely anything could be bought and sold. Carl Ruggles, the most severe of the ultra-moderns, was tormented by that contradiction. He produced a limited number of works, each of them having the hardness and coarseness of granitic rock. His orchestral masterpiece, Sun-Treader, is one of the most tautly argued atonal works in the literature, as propulsive as Beethoven’s Fifth. If Varèse is like early Stravinsky with the folk motifs removed, Ruggles is like Ives without the tunes.
Ruggles and Varèse joined ranks in founding the International Composers’ Guild, which aimed to present difficult music without commercial restrictions. When someone happily observed that one of the concerts had drawn a full house, Ruggles accused his own organization of “catering to the public.” As so often in the modernist saga, revolutionary impulses went hand in hand with intolerance and resentment. Ruggles and Varèse muttered between themselves about the consumerism and vulgarity that were ruining American culture, for which they tended to blame the Jews and the Negroes.
Notwithstanding the obnoxious racial views of the founders, the International Composers’ Guild did make possible a rare breakthrough for a black composer. William Grant Still, a native of Mississippi who moved back and forth between classical activities and a day job at Black Swan Records, studied for a time with Varèse, and his song cycle Levee Land appeared on an ICG program in 1926. Designed as a vehicle for the Harlem musical-theater star Florence Mills, Levee Land unfolds on two distinct but ingeniously coordinated tiers of activity: while the singer delivers vocal lines in classic blues style, the orchestra surrounds her with a seething, discordant harmonic field, including polytonal chords similar to those that Ives used in Three Places in New England. Five years later, Still’s Afro-American Symphony had its premiere at the Rochester Philharmonic, and a black composer finally found a place of respect in classical America.
Virgil Thomson was a movement unto himself. A fastidious Harvard graduate with a Kansas City background, he moved through diverse spheres of modern music without becoming beholden to any of them. From 1925 until 1940 he was based in Paris, where he absorbed lessons from Stravinsky, Les Six, and, especially, Erik Satie. Thomson’s destiny was to produce the American counterpart to Satie’s deceptive naïveté. Where Satie used cabaret melodies and vaudeville dances, Thomson filled his scores with stock Americana—Sunday-school hymns, village-square marches, lazy waltzes suitable for a bandstand on a summer evening.
Thomson’s aesthetic had something in common with that of Ives, but it lacked the chaotic, visionary element; America passed by at a dreamy distance. In Paris, the gregarious young composer befriended several leading modernist artists, and in 1927 he began collaborating with Gertrude Stein, another refugee from the heartland. Something lovely happened when Thomson’s calculatedly simplified music was joined to