Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

"The Rest Is Noise" reminded me of another book in my collection: "Symphonies and Their Meaning" Great Works of Music Philip H. Goepp 1st, 2nd & 3rd Series (a book I've kept, because I assumed that it might be valuable due to its gaudy gold-embossed binding, although I see it's available for $3 through Amazon). These and many other books, along with Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" and the long-running radio show "Adventures In Good Music" hosted by the late Karl Haas, and on down to the lectures at your local community college are part of the grand tradition of Music Appreciation studies. The basic idea of such enterprises is that if you read or listen to someone who is knowledgeable about fine music (as opposed to common music such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Who Threw the Whiskey In the Well?") explain why this music is so prestigious and describe some of the its mechanics, topped off with a declaration of what an immortal genius the composer was, you will somehow "get it," and you will then be a connoisseur of the great masterpieces. Folks, if only you'd study this stuff hard enough, the Holy Ghost or one of the Muses (likely Euterpe) will come down and anoint you, and you'll then be a genuine intellectual. Before reading this book, "Pierrot lunaire" by Schoenberg sounded to you like a subway train coming into a stop combined with feeding time at the zoo, but after reading the tortured prose of Professor Ross it will suddenly be revealed to your now-enlightened ears that it's actually sublime art . . . or "aht." The only trouble is, "Symphonies and Their Meaning" has examples of the masterpieces in musical notation (so as to be played on the parlour piano), and Bernstein's lectures and the Hass radio series broadcasted performances of the music in question, but Professor Ross only writes about how the piece sounds - e.g., there's a blow-by-blow description of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Why would anyone buy this book to read how the music sounds to Dr. Ross when they can easily hear the same music performed? (for a mere 90¢ at this site and free elsewhere) In an effort, I suppose, to vulgarize what is now generally regarded as the music of the chaste, Maestro Ross delights in telling us how naughty this music (not to mention its creators) really is. He seems obsessed with the interval of the diminished fifth - a/k/a, the tritone, a/k/a, the "diabolus in musica." Each time he spots a tritone in the music under consideration, he makes it a point to call our attention to it. This may be titillating to him, but the middle ages have been over for a while now, and this interval occurs in every garden-variety V7 chord. What's the big deal about a tritone if several can be found in "Happy Birthday to You" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame"? And just how does it profit us to learn that one piece has 9 different pitches in a chord and another has 11? Will learning such things really afford us greater enjoyment of the music? To avoid too depressing a report, I would grant that the book is well-researched and a great piece of scholarship, and there are few passages which evoke a HUH? One is his absurd assertion that "Latin American musicians had originated many of the tricky rhythms that figured in early jazz." HUH? Sooo . . . persons of African descent were unfamiliar with "tricky rhythms"? Is there no rhythm in African music? (We'd better send them some cha-cha records at once!) I can imagine that others are as disappointed as I am that many important composers receive scant attention, while every crackpot is treated as a visionary. The book's title is ironic, because Professor Ross chooses to at least mention every serialist, atonalist and microtonalist whose experiments ever emptied a theater, but nothing is said about Ralph Vaughan Williams or Alan Hovhaness. More lines are devoted to the (appallingly influential) rock band The Velvet Underground than to Gustav Holst. A flash-in-the-pan like Brian Eno receives almost a page, but there is no mention of William Walton, Ture Rangström or Alberto Ginastera. There are long passages devoted to Stockhausen, but Respighi doesn't exist. Dr. Ross examines such abstruse methods of composition as "stochastic music" and "aleatory music," but apparently he's unfamiliar with modern Neo-Romantic composers such as Georgy Sviridov, Kirke Mechem, or Marjan Mozetich. For many years now, concert audiences have been voting with their feet against atonal and experimental music, but to Professor Ross, it's the only music that matters (the salient exception being Jan Sibelius, who seems like he's in the wrong book). As best as I can determine, the most popular classical composer of the present day, and by "popular" I mean the most frequently performed composer, is England's Karl Jenkins. His 2006 oratorio "The Armed Man" has been performed regularly in Eastern and Western Europe and throughout the United States and Canada as a concert piece, a ballet and in a mixed-media presentation. Alas, Karl Jenkins is utterly ignored and his name does not appear in the book. Perhaps the tastes of concertgoers is of no worth whatsoever, and Jenkins should be shunned because he actually makes money writing music. The fact that he wrote music used advertisements must automatically disqualify him from consideration in such a profoundly serious tome. Why this should be is not difficult to determine. Young Ross has obviously been spending too much time examining musty artifacts in libraries and breathing the miasma of the academe. Moreover, Manhattan is not a healthy environment for an impressionable young man. What else could cause him to describe a concerto with such purple prose as, "Strings whip up dust clouds around manic dancing feet. Brass play secular chorales, as if seated on the dented steps of a tilting little church. Winds squawk like excited children. Drums bang the drunken lust of young men at the center of the crowd . . . even if some walk away with bruises." Duuude !?!