Читать онлайн «The Rest Is Noise Series: Sunken Cathedrals: Music at Century’s End»
Автор Алекс Росс
This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music,
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
New World Order: No More Rules
Alex Ross, music critic for the
SUNKEN CATHEDRALS
Music at Century’s End
From
Contents
15
SUNKEN CATHEDRALS
Music at Century’s End
As Highway 1, the California coastal highway, goes north of San Francisco, it holds the eyes like a work of art. The landscape might have been devised by a trickster creator who delights in grand gestures and abrupt transitions. Rolling meadows end in cliffs; redwood trees rise above slender patches of beach. Towers of rock rest on the surface of the ocean like the ghosts of clipper ships. A lost cow sits on the shoulder, looking out to sea. Side roads head up the inland hills at odd angles, tempting the aimless driver to follow them to the end. One especially beguiling detour, the Meyers Grade Road, departs from Highway 1 shortly after the town of Jenner. The grade is 18 percent, and the steepness of the ascent causes dizzying distortions of perspective. The Pacific Ocean rises in the rearview mirror like a blue hill across a hidden valley.
Not far from here is Brushy Ridge, the forest home of the composer John Adams.
One way to describe his work is to say that it sounds like Highway 1. It is a cut-up paradise, a stream of familiar sounds arranged in unfamiliar ways. A glitzy Hollywood fanfare gives way to a trancelike sequence of shifting beats; billowing clouds of Wagnerian harmony are dispersed by a quartet of saxophones. It is present-tense American romanticism, honoring the ghosts of Mahler and Sibelius, plugging into minimalist processes, swiping sounds from jazz and rock, browsing the files of postwar innovation. Sundry sounds are broken down and filtered through an instantly recognizable personal voice, sometimes exuberant and sometimes melancholy, sometimes hip and sometimes noble, winding its way through a fragmentary culture.Brushy Ridge is at the far end of the Meyers Grade Road, and the last part of the drive is a matter of guesswork. The Adams house, at the top of a rocky hill, is a comfortable, earthy, rural-hippie kind of place; not too long ago, it served as the headquarters for a pot farm. Walking in, you might find the composer asleep on the couch with the collected poems of Allen Ginsberg lying open in front of him. He has a youthful face, framed by a neat, silvery beard. His eyes are sometimes bright with curiosity, sometimes clouded with a slight sadness. There is an appealing innocence about him, but it is an innocence sharpened by confidence. He speaks in mild, unhurried tones, halting to look for the right words. On occasion, he breaks into an unexpectedly aggressive cackle, underscoring it with a clap of his hands and a merry roll of his eyes.
