While art can be a welcome escape or withdrawal from the world that is too much with us, it is nevertheless very limited in scope and unforgivably 'up itself' if it takes no part in that world.
I'm getting the impression from Alex Ross that the two most influential figures in C20th music were Stalin and Hitler. That can't be right and probably what Ross says is that, during the C20th at least, an absolutely central figure was Schoenberg. But, be all of that what it may, his brilliantly lucid account, full of anecdote, character sketches and connections, does more than suggest that the story of C20th music immediately became more complicated than the whole history of music that came before it.
I have sketched out my own version that centres on Beethoven, goes back from Romanticism through Classical, Baroque and Renaissance to Hildegaard of Bingen and then forwards through Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, the overblown Late Romanticism of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler, which then flounders in trying to explain what Alex Ross makes such a good job of here.
The difference seems to be that, suddenly, all the fault of Romanticism and the value accorded to the individual, it became all about the composer and not the music.
One reads the stories of the doctrines, factions and schools that developed post 1911 and never mind state control by totalitarians whose policies were so all-embracing that they had to include music, that they knew precious little about, it was the composers who were intent on denigrating each other.
I don't imagine for one minute that the host of heavenly baroque composers were all best friends but neither do I think that any of them took time out to denigrate their equivalent of Sibelius to the extent that the now quaint, outmoded 12-note, atonal theorists did.
Did they not realize that what seems so much the fashion one day will look very sad and misguided sooner than they thought. Sadly for them, Sigue Sigue Sputnik were not yet available to ask.
I had my own run-ins on so-called avant-gardism on an internet forum with the editor of a magazine called Brando's Hat. Yes, mate, very cool, very New York but there needs to be more to you than trying to provoke the 'mainstream'. You don't have to admire Larkin, Simon Armitage or Carol Ann Duffy but you need to do more than define yourself as not being them. Is that all you've got.
And so, if Alex Ross has done anything for me apart from set out quite cogently one view of how it all happened, he has clarified some of my own prejudices. As with poetry, music is a broad church and I don't want to be falling out with anyone whose approach is different from my own, but I can see the attraction of the comfort blanket offered by siding with the like-minded.
I am very much with Philip Larkin and less with Ted Hughes, although I admire much of Hughes' work.
And I'm with Shostakovich, Sibelius, and Poulenc amongst others in the C20th, while only in possession of t-shirts with music by Mozart or a picture of Dietich Buxtehude on them but I've now got good reason to confirm the worst composer of all time. It certainly wasn't Wagner, it was never quite the schlerotically dull Bruckner and it's not even Korngold. It's Pierre Boulez.
Constantly deriding almost everything else as 'fascist' and boring us to witlessness with his gormless abstractions, he was an aberration that time will take care of. And thus passes the self-indulgence of the world.
