music

Critic Alex Ross and pianist Ethan Iverson at Herbst

Alex Ross

Jazz Improv and 20th century composers—a divisive subject

Alex Ross, author of the best selling “The Rest is Noise,” came to Herbst Theater Saturday morning to read selections from his book and explicate a century of modern music.

The book is brilliant.

The 90-minute condensation, however, was tinged with a smarmy view of New York as the center of the music world…but nonetheless a fun ride! Ross was accompanied by Ethan Iverson, pianist for the post-modern jazz trio, The Bad Plus. Sprinkling the reading with musical excerpts, Iverson kept our focus on the music as separate from politics or personalities.

Ross described each composer in his social milieu, treating us to an insiders’ look at the motivation of some of the greatest music of the twentieth century. But while musical lineage, social upheavals and personality are a key to understanding the composers and their music, one hopes that brilliance will out.

Schoenberg batted first in Ross’ lineup with his twelve tone composing, and Iverson’s illustration kept a quality of internal brooding. Intervals were grimly expressive and one was left feeling abrupt and uncomfortable. Describing his affect down the ages, Ross read, “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Schoenberg’s music no longer sounds alien. It has radiated out in unpredictable ways… Still, it retains its Faustian aura. These intervals will always shake the air.”

He went on to Bartok, describing his passion for “folk-based musical realism,” the tunes of rural Hungary. And then Ross made an unexpected connection. While discussing Dvorák’s friendship with American composer Harry Burleigh, he described his championing of America’s own musical forms, the Afro-American tradition. Leonard Bernstein wrote an essay on those forms,

“…the bending and breaking of diatonic scales, the distortion of instrumental timbre, the layering of rhythms, the blurring of the distinction between verbal and nonverbal sound…It memorialized the wound at the heart of the national experience—the crime of slavery—and it transcended that suffering.”

Ethan Iverson

Ross went on to describe America’s glory and shame: “What Dvorák did not foresee…was that (American) music would consist of ragtime, jazz, blues, swing, R & B, rock n’ roll, funk, soul, hip-hop, and whatever’s next. Many pioneers of black music might have had major classical careers if the stage door of Carnegie Hall had been open to them…but it was not.”

The lecture went on to describe parallel but separate tracks: Jelly Roll Morton, Gershwin and Charlie Parker on the one hand, and Stravinski, Sibelius and Shostakovich on the other.

But they ended with a lovely and hopeful synthesis.

Iverson asked the audience to call out pitches, which he would then assemble in tone rows to improvise on. A-flat! D! C! He frowned and wrote out a dozen, then began a low rumble, like the “Hymn” from Stravinsky’s Serenade in A that he had earlier played.

High notes trickled in, our random notes gaining a capricious humor. Then a third voice, mid-register, slow and emphatic. A jazz rhythm gently entered, re-working the material with feeling and gesture. Our tone row had gathered its own quirky pedigree and I felt like a proud midwife.

But somehow the twentieth century that I was expecting, from Dadaist audacity to Spectralist decay, Pacific Rim fusions and electronic minimalism—all were curiously absent. And women composers? There is scant mention of any in the 600 pages of his book.

It is a shocking lapse. Apparently Ross is not so distinct from the politics he bemoans.

—Adam Broner

Photo top, Alex Ross read selections from “The Rest is Noise,” his tome on 20th century music; photo bottom, Ethan Iverson interspersed the text with selections from a century of modern music at Herbst Theater April 24.

This article originally appeared in the Piedmont Post.