Michael: Most people think classical music is relaxing. A nice, soothing backdrop for studying or a dinner party. Kevin: Yeah, something your sophisticated aunt puts on. Mozart, Beethoven, the gentle stuff. Michael: Exactly. But what if I told you that a hundred years ago, a single chord in a ballet caused a full-blown riot in Paris? People were throwing punches, the police were called... all over a piece of music. Kevin: Wait, a riot? Like, a real riot with fistfights? Over a ballet? That sounds more like a punk rock show. Michael: It was absolute chaos. And that chaotic, world-changing energy is the subject of our discussion today. We're diving into Alex Ross's incredible book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Kevin: The Rest Is Noise. I love that title. It feels like it’s already challenging you. Michael: It absolutely is. And Ross is the perfect guide for this journey. He's not just a celebrated music critic for The New Yorker; he was actually a composer himself until he was 18. So he writes with this deep empathy for what these artists were trying to do, which is probably why the book won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Kevin: So he’s got the inside perspective. He knows the language. Michael: He does. And he argues this whole chaotic century of music really ignites in one specific place: an opera house in a provincial Austrian town called Graz, on a single night in 1906.

Kevin: Okay, so what happened in Graz? Why was this one night so important? Michael: Picture this scene. The city is buzzing. The opera is Salome, by the German composer Richard Strauss. It's already been banned in Vienna for being scandalous. The story is about a biblical princess who develops a necrophiliac obsession with John the Baptist and demands his head on a platter so she can kiss his dead lips. Kevin: Whoa. Okay, I can see why that would raise a few eyebrows in 1906. That's pretty dark even for today. Michael: It was explosive. But the real story is who was in the audience that night. You have Giacomo Puccini, the superstar composer of La Bohème. You have Gustav Mahler, the most famous conductor in the world. You have the young, radical Arnold Schoenberg and his students. And, according to some accounts, sitting somewhere in the cheap seats is a failed 17-year-old art student named Adolf Hitler. Kevin: That is an unbelievable collection of people. It’s like the Avengers of 20th-century history, both good and evil, all in one room. Michael: It's a perfect microcosm of the century to come. And the music itself was the catalyst. Strauss took the orchestra and pushed it to its absolute limit. The harmonies were dissonant, clashing in ways that audiences had never heard before. It was loud, it was violent, and it was deeply unsettling. One critic at the time admiringly called it "nothing more satanic and artistic." Kevin: So was it just the shocking story, or was the music itself that jarring? Michael: It was both. The music was the feeling of the story. For example, Salome sings this line, "The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death," and as she kisses the severed head, the orchestra erupts in this horrifying, shuddering chord. It wasn't just illustrating the story; it was forcing the audience to feel its psychological sickness. It was a complete break from the beautiful, orderly music of the past. Kevin: And what did the other composers there think? What did Mahler make of all this? Were he and Strauss rivals? Michael: That's a great question, because their relationship is key to this era. They were the two giants of German music, but they were complete opposites. Strauss was worldly, pragmatic, a bit of a cynic. Before the performance, Mahler was getting anxious they'd be late, and Strauss just coolly replied, "They can’t start without me. Let ’em wait." Kevin: I like his confidence. Michael: Mahler, on the other hand, was this deeply spiritual, tormented artist. He once said of their relationship, "Strauss and I tunnel from opposite sides of the mountain. One day we shall meet." They were both digging towards something new, but from completely different directions. Mahler admired Salome's power, even though he couldn't stage it in Vienna. He saw that Strauss had unleashed something powerful, something that couldn't be put back in the box. Modernism in music had arrived, and it was loud, messy, and controversial.

Kevin: So if Strauss blew the doors off with Salome, where does music go from there? Does everyone just get louder and crazier? Michael: That's the million-dollar question. And the answer, as Ross lays it out, splits into two fascinating, and very different, paths. It's almost a tale of two cities: Vienna and Paris. The old rules of harmony were breaking down, and composers had to decide what came next. Kevin: Okay, so what’s happening in Vienna? Michael: In Vienna, you have Arnold Schoenberg. He looks at the emotional chaos of Salome and decides to go even further, but inward. He felt that the entire system of tonality—the familiar framework of major and minor keys that sounds 'right' to our ears—was exhausted, that it had become a lie. It couldn't express the psychological turmoil of the modern world. Kevin: Hold on, Michael. 'Atonality.' That word gets thrown around a lot. For those of us who aren't music theory nerds, what does that actually mean? Does it just mean... random, ugly notes? Michael: That's how many people heard it! But for Schoenberg, it was about liberation. Think of it like this: for centuries, music was like a painting with a clear horizon line and perspective. Schoenberg wanted to create an abstract painting. He wanted to free dissonance from its obligation to resolve into a nice, pleasing chord. He called it the "emancipation of the dissonance." He was trying to compose raw, unfiltered emotion, straight from the subconscious. It was music as psychoanalysis. Kevin: So it’s meant to be unsettling. It’s the sound of anxiety. Michael: Precisely. Meanwhile, across Europe in Paris, you have a young Russian composer named Igor Stravinsky who is taking a completely different path. He wasn't interested in psychology; he was interested in something more primal. He wasn't looking inward; he was looking outward, to the pagan folk rituals of ancient Russia. Kevin: So less Freud, more... ancient earth magic? Michael: A perfect way to put it. Stravinsky believed the future of music lay in rhythm. He started working on a ballet for the famous Ballets Russes company, a piece about a pagan tribe choosing a young girl to dance herself to death to ensure the coming of spring. The piece was called The Rite of Spring. Kevin: That also sounds pretty intense. And this is the piece that caused the riot you mentioned at the beginning? Michael: This is the one. The premiere in Paris in 1913 is one of the most famous scandals in art history. The music starts with a bassoon playing at a register so high, nobody even knew what instrument it was. Then, the orchestra comes in with this one, brutal, stabbing chord, repeated over and over, but with the accents all in the wrong places. It felt like the music was having a seizure. Kevin: And the dancing? Michael: The choreography was just as shocking. The dancers, instead of being graceful and elegant, were pigeon-toed, knock-kneed, stomping and jerking like puppets. The high-society Parisian audience was horrified. They started booing and hissing. People who liked it started shouting back. Soon, insults were flying, then canes were being brandished, and fistfights broke out. The composer Saint-Saëns reportedly stormed out, furious. Stravinsky himself fled backstage in a panic. It was a full-blown brawl. Kevin: Wow. So you have Schoenberg in a quiet room breaking the rules of harmony, and Stravinsky in a packed theater breaking the rules of rhythm and causing a public brawl. Two sides of the same modernist coin. Michael: Exactly. Both were a reaction against the overstuffed, sentimental world of 19th-century Romanticism. One path led to the intellectual, psychological complexity of atonality. The other led to the visceral, rhythmic, primal energy of modern dance. And both proved that music was no longer just a pleasant diversion. It was a force that could shock, provoke, and divide.

Michael: But this artistic revolution soon collides with a much more brutal one: politics. As we move into the 1930s, the question isn't just 'what is music?' but 'what is music for?' And nowhere was that question more dangerous than in the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Kevin: This is where the story gets really dark, I imagine. Michael: It gets terrifying. Ross tells the chilling story of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. By the mid-1930s, Shostakovich is a superstar, the golden boy of Soviet music. His opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District—another tale of a murderous woman, by the way—is a massive hit. It's being performed all over the world. Kevin: So he’s on top of the world. Michael: Until one night in January 1936. He gets a call and is told to attend a performance of his own opera at the Bolshoi Theatre. When he gets there, he sees that Joseph Stalin and his top Politburo members are in the state box, shielded by a curtain. Shostakovich is seated where he can be watched by them. He has to sit there, white-knuckled, as the most powerful and murderous man in the world judges his work. Kevin: I'm getting chills just thinking about that. What happened? Michael: Stalin left before the end. No comment, no invitation to the box, just silence. Shostakovich knew this was a very bad sign. Two days later, an anonymous editorial appears in the state newspaper, Pravda. The headline is "Muddle Instead of Music." It tears his opera to shreds, calling it a "deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds" and "formalist" noise that catered to bourgeois tastes. Kevin: It’s not just a bad review, it’s a political denunciation. Michael: It's far worse than that. The article ends with a line that became infamous: "This is a game... that may end very badly." It was a direct threat. In the middle of Stalin's Great Terror, when people were disappearing every night, this was a potential death sentence. Shostakovich, the celebrated artist, was now an enemy of the people. He packed a small suitcase with essentials and slept in the hallway outside his apartment so that when the secret police came for him, they wouldn't disturb his family. Kevin: That's horrifying. It's not just about artistic freedom anymore; it's about literal survival. How does an artist even function under that kind of pressure? Michael: That's the central question Ross explores. Music was no longer an abstract art form. It was a political tool. In the Soviet Union, it had to be "for the people"—simple, heroic, optimistic. In Nazi Germany, it was a tool of racial purity. They revered Wagner and Beethoven as symbols of German greatness while simultaneously using music to lull victims in the concentration camps. The phrase from Paul Celan's poem, "death is a Meister from Germany," captures this horrific paradox. Kevin: So art, which we think of as this pure, transcendent thing, was dragged right into the mud and blood of history. Michael: Completely. And it lost its innocence. Ross argues that this is why, for decades after the war, classical music in movies often became the soundtrack for villains. Think of Alex in A Clockwork Orange loving Beethoven, or the "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now. The 20th century proved that a man could listen to Bach in the morning and oversee atrocities in the afternoon. The art form was no longer morally pure.

Kevin: So, after all this chaos—riots, revolutions, dictators—what's the big takeaway from The Rest Is Noise? Where does this leave music? Michael: I think Ross's ultimate point is that music isn't a hermetically sealed art form, separate from the world. It's a living, breathing part of history. The 'noise' of the 20th century—the dissonance of Schoenberg, the rhythmic riots of Stravinsky, the political terror faced by Shostakovich—wasn't a sign of music's decay. It was a sign of its vitality. It was the sound of an art form grappling with a violent, chaotic, and rapidly changing world. Kevin: So the noise was the music. The chaos was the message. Michael: Exactly. From that scandalous opera premiere in Graz in 1906, with all those historical figures in one room, to a composer fearing for his life in Moscow in 1936, music was right there in the trenches of history. It reflected the world, and in some cases, it even shaped it. It wasn't just background music to the 20th century; it was one of the main characters in its story. Kevin: It makes you wonder what the 'noise' of our own century will sound like to future generations. What are the sounds we're ignoring right now that are actually telling the story of our time? Michael: That's a great question for our listeners. What do you think? From the glitchy sounds of electronic music to the cacophony of social media, what is the sound of the 21st century? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels. We'd love to hear what you think the 'noise' of today is. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.