The most provocative part of Alex Ross’ first book, The Rest Is Noise, a large tome about the classical music of the twentieth century that is part document, part muse, is the aim he takes at Arnold Schoenberg and the authority of the atonal school of writing. This book would not have been written fifty years ago, when, say, Pierre Boulez had recently published the inflamatory and avant-galvanizing essay, “Schoenberg Is Dead,” which, ironically, pushed Schoenberg’s theories into more remote and colder regions. Nor would it have been written even twenty years ago, even after a decade and a half of downtown minimalist influence had chipped away at serialism’s stronghold. No, Ross’ book emerges decisively out of the aesthetic orgasm of classical music’s present: a giant release that’s spawning innumerable quasi-tonal composers, be they neo-romantic (generally rehashed Strauss and Mahler) or pop-minimalist. And for that, I have to give Ross credit, since in my first review, I think I said there wasn’t anything “new” about his version of the story. (My bad. Forgive?) But the credit I’m giving Ross is definitely mixed, and for a few important reasons.

When Anthony Tommasini published a how-to guide to serialism in The Times earlier this fall, I was in awe, not only because he seems to be quite able at the keyboard, but mainly since there has been so much anti-serialist sentiment in the air of the musical community. Check out the wonderful Arts Journal blogs, Post Classic (by Kyle Gann) and Sandow (by Gregg Sandow) to peruse some of the chatter. Basically, almost an entire generation of composers educated in conservatories between 1950s and the late 1970s feels that their creative personalities were squashed by the dogma of Boulez and his camp of total serialism. I don’t doubt this is largely true. Back in 2000, I remember hearing one of my professors confess with wide eyed glee that he was finally able to write the kind of music he had always wanted to write (awful pieces for trombone and electronic audio, if you’re curious).

I would argue, first of all, that any kind of rigorous training, conservative or avant garde, squashes, to a large degree, all kinds of expressivity. That’s the point of training. You reign in the novice, and, hopefully, turn out a pro. Ideally one will be able to do more with their expressive impulses once they have a solid technique in hand: that’s holds true with any practice. But in the case of serialism’s dogmatic reign, a lot of composers who didn’t write in dodecophinic ways faced circular ridicule. That didn’t stop the likes of Sessions, Copland, Bernstein, Rorem, Reich, Glass, and a host of others who made careers for themselves writing in a contemporary tonality; but many older composers feel jilted, and that their careers were stunted because of the suffocating power of the serialist mindset.

The Rest Is Noise will, for this group of peers, confirm their grievances. Ross paints a portrait of Schoenberg that, while conferring just credit to his genius (even of his atonal and serial works) and influence, also attempts to debunk Schoenberg’s claim to being the inheritor of historical inevitability, while simultaneously laying blame on Schoenberg for one of the most contentiously debated realities of today: How did classical music lose its audience?

To the first point, Ross writes:

…the very multiplicity of possible explanations [for Schoenberg's decision to invent atonality] points up something that cannot be explained. There was no “necessity” driving atonality; no irreversible current of history made it happen. It was one man’s leap into the unknown.

This passage takes direct aim at the lore Schoenberg kicked up around his atonal work. First of all, he pretty much implies that Arnold Schoeberg isn’t a fair judge of his own decision making. Schoenberg is pretty clear, artistically, about why he made the leap into uncharted waters. In many ways he wrote his own history through several volumes of literature, often outlining a Darwinian theory of the inevitable push from hyper-chromatic tonal harmony to complete chromaticism. In his words, it was an expressive necessity. And, indeed, in music school, you are taught this inevitable series of events. But Ross, with socio-historical hindsight, seems to think that other factors (political, personal, social) might have had more realistic affect on Schoenberg’s work than merel expressive necessity. It’s daring. But Ross also contradicts himself, since he has been telling this story through the first two chapters, the one that connects the dots between Wagner, Mahler, Strauss and Schoenberg. He also writes, after commenting how experiments in atonality had been surfacing in various parts of Europe and even in the Americas, “The fabric of harmony was warping, as if under the influence of an unseen force.” He seems to be arguing that there was, in fact, some common source of creative energy affecting all Western-based tonal cultures, pushing at the limits of traditional tonality. Go ahead, Ross: Eat your cake.

But that isn’t enough. To further reduce the perhaps overblown worship of Schoenberg and his camp, Ross relies on cultural and political contexts to align atonal dogma with Nazism. I detected this impulse throughout the firt chapter, and in chapter two, the correlations come to stark fruition. Ross writes, “The cultish fanaticism of modern art [which includes atonality] turns out to be not unrelated to the politics of fascism: both attempt to remake the world in utopian forms.”

Ross also outlines jingositic attitudes that had already surfaced in Austro-German culture in the beginning of the twentieth century, mainly aimed at France, but, no doubt, was bent to fuel anti-semitism by the Nazis. It was kind of disheartening to read how Schoenberg and his pupils got sucked into fighter mode (or “war psychosis”) during WWI. (Is it too forgiving to say they didn’t know any better?) Also, some of Schoenberg’s rhetoric was a little on the rancorous side, particularly his use of disease as a metaphor for French decadence.

But, and a big but, art is immune from many moral expectations. Art is where we are allowed to function as fascists (Le Corboussier) or communists (The Wooster Group) or capitalists (Damien Hirst). It is also where, as the viewer, we are allowed to experience a range of emotions and senstations outside of what is commonly considered decent (lust, vengeance, envy). So to fault an art or artist because of the method that is used to create the work is moot. The mental game art becomes alleviates moral responsibility in a number of ways (to be clear, in flase ways, not in real or legal ways).

Furthermore, to draw this parallel, Ross has to compress time and events. Nazism didn’t really take hold until the 1930s, a full twenty years after the advent of Schoenberg’s “total” atonality, and some fifty years after late-romantic chromaticism.

Then why try to pin these two together? Because Ross is arguing that Schoenberg is responsible, through totalitarian means and the establishment of private concerts, of disenfranchising the classical audience. Ross believes we are the inheritors of this anti-audience mentality. But Beethoven is really responsible for this, surely. He is arguably the first modern composer, both in personality and style of music. The bottom line is that with the advent of true modernism came an impulse to upend the status quo. IT HAPPENED, and Schoenberg just happened to be there. Right place, right time. He can be held no more accountable than anyone else (save Boulez, wink). In fact, his socio-historical-political context should aleviate him of a lot of the responsibility. He was an artist of his time, and an artist of his time, which is the definition by which we still go today, always seeks the new in an effort to establish his own voice and to critique the present. That’s it. Just ask Jerome Bell.

At the very least, things are heating up in The Rest Is Noise, which I have to say, I like. Ross is much more forgiving of Berg and Webern (Schoenberg’s most famous disciples). The passage on Wozzeck is detailed with a lot of concrete musical analysis. But it ends mysteriously with a premonition and a prescription for a musical realm that would escape the atonal dogma. In comparing the final scenes of Wozzeck and Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, where children are left onstage, orphaned by the deaths of their parents, he writes:

The onlooker is left to imagine the fate of these orphans of the fin de siecle: perhaps they will perpetuate the cycle of misery, breeding violence from violence, or perhaps they will escapeto some great open city, where the children of unhappy families start anew.

This uncomfortably schmaltzy musing is also tendentious in how it is being used as a metaphor for the poor orphaned composeres who no longer have the safety of tonality’s bossom from which to draw nourshment. Who, exactly is unhappy? And what is the great open city? I’m almost afraid to find out.