The Rest Is Noise Series: Sunken Cathedrals: Music at Century’s End

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Alex Ross. The Rest Is Noise Series: Sunken Cathedrals: Music at Century’s End

SUNKEN CATHEDRALS. Music at Century’s End. From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross

15. SUNKEN CATHEDRALS. Music at Century’s End

After the End

After Europe

After Minimalism

After Modernism

After the Soviets

After Britten

Nixon in China

NOTES. Abbreviations Used

Sunken Cathedrals

SUGGESTED LISTENING AND READING. Five Recommended Recordings

Sunken Cathedrals

Read the full book. The Rest is Noise

Copyright

About the Publisher

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This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.

It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you’re attending concerts in the episode

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Perhaps Ligeti was right; perhaps classical composition is being sustained past its date of expiration by the stubborn determination of those who perform it, those who support it, and, above all, those who write it. More likely, though, a thousand-year-old tradition won’t expire with the flipping of a calendar or the aging of a baby-boom cohort. Confusion is often a prelude to consolidation; we may even be on the verge of a new golden age. For now, the art is like the “sunken cathedral” that Debussy depicts in his Preludes for Piano—a city that chants beneath the waves.

“The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler said to Sibelius in 1907. “It must be all-embracing.” Now classical music is the world; it has ceased to be a European art. You can use new works to draw a map of the globe—from the orchestral pieces of the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe, which draw on the sounds and rhythms of the Australian outback, to R. Murray Schafer’s radical music-theater cycle Patria, which can only be performed in the forests and lakes of the Canadian north. A comprehensive list of significant voices in contemporary music would include Franghiz Ali-Zadeh of Azerbaijan, Chen Yi of China, Unsuk Chin of South Korea, Sofia Gubaidulina of Russia, Kaija Saariaho of Finland, and Pauline Oliveros of the United States. Composition has also ceased to be predominantly male; the preceding six composers are all women.

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