Lingering notes

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
By Alex Ross
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 624 pp., illustrated, $30

"The Rest Is Noise" introduces itself with the literary equivalent of an opening gong. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross begins his rigorous survey of the "serious" music of the past century with a splashy, attention-grabbing anecdote.

In 1928, George Gershwin was invited to the Austrian home of Alban Berg, one of the ascendant leaders of Vienna's atonal avant-garde. When young Gershwin sat down to play some piano pieces after a string quartet performance of Berg's formidable music, he was suddenly stricken with self-doubt about his own romantically jazzy compositions. Berg, sensing his guest's apprehension, did not hesitate to knock it out of him.

"Mr. Gershwin," he said, "music is music."

Music has come to be seen as all things to all people in the past century - the age of modernism and technology, mass production and unprecedented documentation. But such vast diffusion has necessarily obliterated the possibility of any one sound embodying something for everyone.

Alongside the rise of ever-mutating popular styles, from ragtime to Rage Against the Machine, the monumental human achievement of the classical music canon has disintegrated into an unsortable rubble of eggheaded, stubbornly introverted factions. Or at least that's the perception, suggests Ross, who readily admits the genre is now "widely mocked as a stuck-up, sissified, intrinsically un-American pursuit."

But despite routine pronouncements of the death of the form, with record sales and attendance figures evidently plummeting, Ross sees classical music as a consistently viable analog to the historic course of the century. The early days of radio and television were saturated with culturally edifying master performances, and Broadway showed Hollywood how life's bottomless emotions can be expressed by a symphony orchestra.

Charlie Parker and John Coltrane were intimately attuned to the music of Stravinsky and Sibelius, and the present-day pop music of Björk and Missy Elliott could not have emerged without the pioneering minimalism of Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Music history, Ross writes, "is too often treated as a kind of Mercator projection of the globe, a flat image representing a landscape that is in reality borderless and continuous."

In that spirit, Ross's history is freely associative and impressively omnivorous. Decades are vaulted, and then revisited, in pursuit of various strains. Key figures - Richard Strauss, Shostakovich, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, Reich - create recurring motifs in the narrative.

In a century defined by its globalization, the allure of cultural nationalism emerges as one of the book's great themes. How the composers of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and the World War II-era United States approached their craft, both for better and for worse, constitutes the second of the book's three sections. Like the rise of serialism, John Cage's "chance" music, and other maverick techniques, the politicization of music wasn't always pretty. The notion "that there is some inherent spiritual goodness in artists of great talent" took an awful beating during the superpower struggles of the middle century, Ross writes.

The critic can be a maestro with his turns of phrase. The clinical Cold War-era approach of the American Milton Babbitt, for instance, produced "music so byzantine in construction that one practically needed a security clearance to understand it," while the "New Complexity" of contemporary composer Brian Ferneyhough constitutes "a mosh pit for the mind."

And the author's musical descriptions are often wondrously specific. The "stupefying" sound of Iannis Xenakis's "Metastaseis," to cite one example, features 46 string instruments playing a G in unison, "then sliding away from it in upward or downward glissandos," each moving at a different rate. The result, Ross writes, is "meticulously planned bedlam." Xenakis, he explains, looks at the orchestra "as a scientist looks at a gas cloud."

Inevitably, his third section feels a shade less weighty than the first two. In the imperial age of pop music, and without the benefit of prolonged hindsight, relatively few living composers have managed to assure themselves of immortality in their work. But unlike the doomsayers, the Harvard-educated Ross, not yet 40, seems admirably open-minded about the future of composition. Just as he charts the influence of early African-American folk and jazz styles on classical music at the turn of the 20th century, he foresees a progressive intermingling of street-level and ivory-tower methodologies as the potential savior of serious music.

When he posits a "great fusion" of "intelligent pop artists and extroverted composers speaking more or less the same language," the prospect clearly appeals to him. In Hollywood, Ross notes with some amusement, classical music purism has come to signify extreme psychopathology: think of Alex, the irredeemable, Beethoven-worshiping thug of Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange," or Hannibal Lecter's passion for the Goldberg Variations in "The Silence of the Lambs."

There is, as "The Rest Is Noise" testifies, a lot more humanity left in the classical tradition than that.

Frequent Globe contributor James Sullivan is working on a book on the cultural impact of James Brown.