The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

John Cage wrote in his book Silence, “what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”

Musical meaning is vague, mutable, and, in the end, deeply personal. Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history.

WHERE TO LISTEN

If you would like to hear some of the music discussed in these pages, a free audio companion is available at www.therestisnoise.com/audio. There you will find streaming samples arranged by chapter, along with links to audio-rich Web sites and other channels of direct access to the music. An iTunes playlist of twenty representative excerpts can be found at www.therestisnoise.com/playlist. For a glossary of musical terms go to www.therestisnoise.com/glossary.

Some genres have attained more popularity than others; none has true mass appeal. What delights one group gives headaches to another.

For the rich, classical music was a status symbol, a collector’s delight. Millionaires signed up musicians in much the same way they bought up and brought home pieces of European art.

The company visited a waterfall and had lunch in an inn,

Anti-Semites and ultranationalists considered Wagner their private prophet, but he gave impetus to almost every major political and aesthetic movement of the age: liberalism (Théodore de Banville said that Wagner was a “democrat, a new man, wanting to create for all the people”), bohemianism (Baudelaire hailed the composer as the vessel of a “counter-religion, a Satanic religion”), African-American activism (a story in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk tells of a young black man who finds momentary hope in Lohengrin), feminism (M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, said that Lohengrin made her “feel a little like my real self”), and even Zionism (Theodor Herzl first formulated his vision of a Jewish state after attending a performance of Tannhäuser).

Richard I and III

Vox populi, vox Dei.

First, the notes C-sharp and G are separated by the interval known as the tritone, one half-step narrower than the perfect fifth. (Leonard Bernstein’s “Maria” opens with a tritone resolving to a fifth.) This interval has long caused uneasy vibrations in human ears; scholars called it diabolus in musica, the musical devil.