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Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen
Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news. However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances - and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to establish a "synaesthesia" between their two media. Fear of Music examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?
149 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 24, 2009
8 people are currently reading
412 people want to read
About the author
David Stubbs
16 books38 followersDavid Stubbs is a British journalist and author, covering music, film, TV and sport. He is known for his work on the Maker’s "Talk Talk Talk" column, converting it from a two-page gossip spread into a satirical and surreal take on the rock and pop world and those characters who stalked it, both the heroes and the hapless.
Among his creations were Pepe Le Punk, a Belgian music journalist (author of Hi, I’m Mr Grunge – An Unauthorised Autobiography Of Kurt Cobain); Derek Kent, MM staff writer since 1926, wit, raconteur and pervert, and Diary Of A Manic Street Preachers Fan (who admired the group for their “intense intensitude”); The Nod Corner, the fictional journals of the Fields Of The Nephilim drummer whose scheming bandmates continually got him into hot water with lead singer Carl McCoy, who would administer him the punishment of ten press-ups. The likes of Sinead O’ Connor, Morrissey, The Mission, Andrew Eldritch, Bono and Blur were also sent up on a regular basis.
However, his most famous and beloved creation was Mr Agreeable (formerly Mr Abusing), whose weekly column was a terse exercise in unmitigated, asterisk-strafed invective scattered at all and sundry, especially the sundry, in the rock world – the various c***s, streaks of piss, f***wits, arseholes and twotmongers who raised his blood pressure often by their mere existence. Although Stubbs left Melody Maker in 1998 to work for a cross range of titles including NME, Vox and Uncut, Mr Agreeable remains an occasionally active commentator, occasionally dropping in at The Quietus to vent his ire.
- excerpted from his website: http://www.mr-agreeable.net
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
David^^Stubbs
Among his creations were Pepe Le Punk, a Belgian music journalist (author of Hi, I’m Mr Grunge – An Unauthorised Autobiography Of Kurt Cobain); Derek Kent, MM staff writer since 1926, wit, raconteur and pervert, and Diary Of A Manic Street Preachers Fan (who admired the group for their “intense intensitude”); The Nod Corner, the fictional journals of the Fields Of The Nephilim drummer whose scheming bandmates continually got him into hot water with lead singer Carl McCoy, who would administer him the punishment of ten press-ups. The likes of Sinead O’ Connor, Morrissey, The Mission, Andrew Eldritch, Bono and Blur were also sent up on a regular basis.
However, his most famous and beloved creation was Mr Agreeable (formerly Mr Abusing), whose weekly column was a terse exercise in unmitigated, asterisk-strafed invective scattered at all and sundry, especially the sundry, in the rock world – the various c***s, streaks of piss, f***wits, arseholes and twotmongers who raised his blood pressure often by their mere existence. Although Stubbs left Melody Maker in 1998 to work for a cross range of titles including NME, Vox and Uncut, Mr Agreeable remains an occasionally active commentator, occasionally dropping in at The Quietus to vent his ire.
- excerpted from his website: http://www.mr-agreeable.net
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
David^^Stubbs
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
July 10, 2011
This was an interesting but ultimately disappointing book. It purports to explain why ‘people get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen (that is, why crowds worship at the great gallery sanctuaries of modern art but do not listen to modern music).
In fact, it is a fairly unsophisticated polemic from a journalist that, in the end, rather fails to do much more than whimper about the current state of affairs.
Yet at times, like all good journalism, I found it hard to put the book down and it was only when I asked for and failed to get analysis and some depth that the book lost its fifth star.
This is not to say that Stubbs is not insightful on aspects of the state of music - he is good on the forward drive in black music, the role of the BBC and the elaborate economic con trick called conceptual art, the perfect art for the age of derivatives and the art we deserved at the time.
However, the book introduces us to the key names and works of alternative traditions in Western music. For that reason alone, it is worth buying and (if you live in London) wandering around the more recherché record shops in and around Berwick Street in Soho to pick up something different.
I shall get my own theory out of the way which has nothing to do with capitalism or power but simply is about time.
We can take in a picture at a glance and then choose to go back for more when we have sufficient time. The glance allows us to ‘fake it’ until we do so and can help create a shared cultural illusion that we all 'get it'. Music takes time, even in YouTube gobbets.
You either experience it in some extended time or you do not experience it at all. If it is difficult or you are not in the mood, there is less incentive to get enough of it to park it for later and, of course, it is not easy to point at this ‘it’ to another as if you understood it.
Because our culture pours over us so many opportunities to see art in an instant and because we are used to the two or three minute quick fix single or track, it takes proportionally greater effort to experiment with sound – so we don’t. Life is too short in a very meaningful sense.
There is also a psychological issue that Stubbs only skims, referring at the end to David Reynolds on the problem of ‘noise music’. Art and music is seen to be, perhaps required to be, a soother of anxieties or an expression of adolescent feeling. It forms the mind in youth and comforts later.
Music is not, for most people, a thing-in-itself. It cannot have a discomfiting purpose, one designed, as Throbbing Gristle clearly intended it to have, to change consciousness through disrupting perception.
The population are not elite tantrics but rather are stressed out survivors of a demanding capitalist democracy. They simply cannot cope with Anonymous, let alone Sun Ra.
This exhausted population wants meaning on a plate rather than to be faced with anything that simply exists in and for itself, meaning that soothes and endorses identities that are constructed not in accordance with reality but in defiance of it.
Nevertheless, as a guide to various corners of ‘difficult music’, this book can be read with profit. The musicians and composers named by Stubbs and not previously known to me will now be searched out over the coming years.
If others do this perhaps advanced music will become more popular. As someone who discovered Stockhausen early and preferred ‘Gesang der Junglinge’ to the bleatings of the late romantics, perhaps I have a nose for ‘noise’.
But there are treasures out there for anyone, most of which can be found with only a little effort on YouTube and then put it in a Playlist for when time is available.
One major complaint is that the proofreading of this book is, in places, dire.
The idea that an ‘ethical and distinctive publishing company’ [Zero Books] might be permitted more latitude in this respect than evil capitalists is absurd. It rather confirms the prejudice that lefties find it difficult to organise a whelk stall.
In fact, it is a fairly unsophisticated polemic from a journalist that, in the end, rather fails to do much more than whimper about the current state of affairs.
Yet at times, like all good journalism, I found it hard to put the book down and it was only when I asked for and failed to get analysis and some depth that the book lost its fifth star.
This is not to say that Stubbs is not insightful on aspects of the state of music - he is good on the forward drive in black music, the role of the BBC and the elaborate economic con trick called conceptual art, the perfect art for the age of derivatives and the art we deserved at the time.
However, the book introduces us to the key names and works of alternative traditions in Western music. For that reason alone, it is worth buying and (if you live in London) wandering around the more recherché record shops in and around Berwick Street in Soho to pick up something different.
I shall get my own theory out of the way which has nothing to do with capitalism or power but simply is about time.
We can take in a picture at a glance and then choose to go back for more when we have sufficient time. The glance allows us to ‘fake it’ until we do so and can help create a shared cultural illusion that we all 'get it'. Music takes time, even in YouTube gobbets.
You either experience it in some extended time or you do not experience it at all. If it is difficult or you are not in the mood, there is less incentive to get enough of it to park it for later and, of course, it is not easy to point at this ‘it’ to another as if you understood it.
Because our culture pours over us so many opportunities to see art in an instant and because we are used to the two or three minute quick fix single or track, it takes proportionally greater effort to experiment with sound – so we don’t. Life is too short in a very meaningful sense.
There is also a psychological issue that Stubbs only skims, referring at the end to David Reynolds on the problem of ‘noise music’. Art and music is seen to be, perhaps required to be, a soother of anxieties or an expression of adolescent feeling. It forms the mind in youth and comforts later.
Music is not, for most people, a thing-in-itself. It cannot have a discomfiting purpose, one designed, as Throbbing Gristle clearly intended it to have, to change consciousness through disrupting perception.
The population are not elite tantrics but rather are stressed out survivors of a demanding capitalist democracy. They simply cannot cope with Anonymous, let alone Sun Ra.
This exhausted population wants meaning on a plate rather than to be faced with anything that simply exists in and for itself, meaning that soothes and endorses identities that are constructed not in accordance with reality but in defiance of it.
Nevertheless, as a guide to various corners of ‘difficult music’, this book can be read with profit. The musicians and composers named by Stubbs and not previously known to me will now be searched out over the coming years.
If others do this perhaps advanced music will become more popular. As someone who discovered Stockhausen early and preferred ‘Gesang der Junglinge’ to the bleatings of the late romantics, perhaps I have a nose for ‘noise’.
But there are treasures out there for anyone, most of which can be found with only a little effort on YouTube and then put it in a Playlist for when time is available.
One major complaint is that the proofreading of this book is, in places, dire.
The idea that an ‘ethical and distinctive publishing company’ [Zero Books] might be permitted more latitude in this respect than evil capitalists is absurd. It rather confirms the prejudice that lefties find it difficult to organise a whelk stall.
September 20, 2015
Despite being subtitled "Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen", Fear of Music doesn't actually address the question of "why modern [read: avant garde] art is embraced and understood while modern [as above] music is ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated and listened to by the inexplicably crazed", as the blurb puts it, until its conclusion - a mere 26 pages out of 137. Rather, the first 111 pages set out the parallel histories of the two beasts.
The answers eventually proffered are: because the megabucks associated with modern art have familiarised the public with it; because modern music can feel like an infliction; because music more powerfully depicts the future, and the future is bleak; because humans are inherently more tolerant of visual than auditory chaos; and, a more general repetition of the first, because people aren't used to modern music.
Of these, I give most credence to the infliction and tolerance suggestions. To take the latter first, modern music much more commonly causes physical pain through sheer extent (in its case, volume) than modern art when experienced live, and auditory chaos also much more readily causes headaches (even at reasonable volume).
The infliction point is related. Although modern art often aims to challenge, it doesn't generally aim to cause as much unpleasantness to its audience as possible, whereas this does seem to be the aim of bands like Throbbing Gristle, Napalm Death and Sunn O))). A more appropriate comparison to these more extreme avant garde bands than the sublime (in an artistic sense) works of Rothko would be images of violence such as those force-fed to Alex in A Clockwork Orange.
The very premise of the book is on shaky ground in this respect. In setting out the history of avant garde music, Stubbs includes such figures as Jimi Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Brian Eno and Radiohead - hardly musicians that lacked a popular following. Furthermore, he states that millions of people already do embrace avant garde music (albeit calling this "a tiny fragment of the overall demographic"). Most damagingly, he even says "it's hard to conceive that Duke Ellington's music was once considered 'dissonant' or to recapture just what a fissure the joyful peal of Louis Armstrong's trumpet represented" - i.e., that in these cases at least the avant garde has been wholly accepted by and subsumed into the mainstream.
Likewise, although Rothko is indeed extremely popular, the same cannot be said of all avant garde art. The Tate Modern may receive millions of visitors per year, but this is due more to its cannily having been established as a symbol of trendy London and to the monumentalism of the building itself than to its housing works by the likes of Giacometti, which are barely glanced at by the incessantly shuffling crowds, despite a Giacometti having sold for $141m this year. The public much prefers shows of works by old masters like Rembrandt and Leonardo or impressionists like Monet to the Futurists or conceptualists.
Having said all that, I like the premise of the book even if it's a false one, simply because it gives Stubbs the chance to provide his parallel histories of these two fascinating movements. And I like the book itself: Stubbs writes well and with a keen eye for what to cover from what must have been a wealth of material, and includes just enough of himself to add an extra dimension without being intrusive. I read it in one day, fighting to keep going through straining eyes.
The book is also a fantastic way of discovering new music, and I recommend having access to Spotify or similar when reading it so that you can appreciate what's being discussed as you go along.
I also like the ethos of Zero Books, which claims to have the lofty aim of fighting the contemporary elimination of the public and the intellectual.
However, while both the publisher and the author seek to stand up for the avant garde, I do wish they hadn't taken such a free-thinking approach to grammar and spelling in the edition of FoM I read: practices such as printing words in a meaningful order, including every word in a sentence but only as many times as is required, subject-verb agreement, apostrophe placement, knowledge of what commas are for and reserving paragraph returns for the ends of paragraphs do help to convey a message more easily, boringly conservative though they may be.
The answers eventually proffered are: because the megabucks associated with modern art have familiarised the public with it; because modern music can feel like an infliction; because music more powerfully depicts the future, and the future is bleak; because humans are inherently more tolerant of visual than auditory chaos; and, a more general repetition of the first, because people aren't used to modern music.
Of these, I give most credence to the infliction and tolerance suggestions. To take the latter first, modern music much more commonly causes physical pain through sheer extent (in its case, volume) than modern art when experienced live, and auditory chaos also much more readily causes headaches (even at reasonable volume).
The infliction point is related. Although modern art often aims to challenge, it doesn't generally aim to cause as much unpleasantness to its audience as possible, whereas this does seem to be the aim of bands like Throbbing Gristle, Napalm Death and Sunn O))). A more appropriate comparison to these more extreme avant garde bands than the sublime (in an artistic sense) works of Rothko would be images of violence such as those force-fed to Alex in A Clockwork Orange.
The very premise of the book is on shaky ground in this respect. In setting out the history of avant garde music, Stubbs includes such figures as Jimi Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Brian Eno and Radiohead - hardly musicians that lacked a popular following. Furthermore, he states that millions of people already do embrace avant garde music (albeit calling this "a tiny fragment of the overall demographic"). Most damagingly, he even says "it's hard to conceive that Duke Ellington's music was once considered 'dissonant' or to recapture just what a fissure the joyful peal of Louis Armstrong's trumpet represented" - i.e., that in these cases at least the avant garde has been wholly accepted by and subsumed into the mainstream.
Likewise, although Rothko is indeed extremely popular, the same cannot be said of all avant garde art. The Tate Modern may receive millions of visitors per year, but this is due more to its cannily having been established as a symbol of trendy London and to the monumentalism of the building itself than to its housing works by the likes of Giacometti, which are barely glanced at by the incessantly shuffling crowds, despite a Giacometti having sold for $141m this year. The public much prefers shows of works by old masters like Rembrandt and Leonardo or impressionists like Monet to the Futurists or conceptualists.
Having said all that, I like the premise of the book even if it's a false one, simply because it gives Stubbs the chance to provide his parallel histories of these two fascinating movements. And I like the book itself: Stubbs writes well and with a keen eye for what to cover from what must have been a wealth of material, and includes just enough of himself to add an extra dimension without being intrusive. I read it in one day, fighting to keep going through straining eyes.
The book is also a fantastic way of discovering new music, and I recommend having access to Spotify or similar when reading it so that you can appreciate what's being discussed as you go along.
I also like the ethos of Zero Books, which claims to have the lofty aim of fighting the contemporary elimination of the public and the intellectual.
However, while both the publisher and the author seek to stand up for the avant garde, I do wish they hadn't taken such a free-thinking approach to grammar and spelling in the edition of FoM I read: practices such as printing words in a meaningful order, including every word in a sentence but only as many times as is required, subject-verb agreement, apostrophe placement, knowledge of what commas are for and reserving paragraph returns for the ends of paragraphs do help to convey a message more easily, boringly conservative though they may be.
June 8, 2014
Great title, very attractive subject. Sadly, the execution didn't live up to either of these. By the end I'd gained (or been reminded of) lots of reference points to go and look up in my own time, but very little sense that Stubbs had answered the question he posed in the book's subtitle. Also, and it may seem like a small quibble, whoever proofread the book (assuming anyone did) needs to be shot.
May 27, 2025
One point Stubbs swerves around but never quite crashes into is the radically different cultural space visual art and music occupy in modern life. Avant-garde visual art has always had its own sandbox. If you want to see a Pollock or a Rothko, you go to a museum. It’s a controlled environment. You know you’re entering a zone where nothing has to make sense. No one stumbles into a gallery, sees a black square on a white canvas, and screams, “OH MY GOD, THIS ISN’T PAINTING.” You walked in. You knew what this was.
The only people who get viscerally angry at modern visual art are the kind of people who never actually engage with it. When climate activists throw soup at a Van Gogh, it’s not a protest against art, it’s a protest through art. The medium is incidental. The rage is borrowed. No one’s trying to cancel Kandinsky.
Music, though? Music is different. Music is everywhere. It's not a niche indulgence or a weekend activity. It’s the dominant cultural currency. It’s in your car, your AirPods, your gym, your bar, your kid’s TikTok. People don’t just like music, they wrap their identities around it. They get tattoos of lyrics. They name their dogs after pop stars. They marry to it. So when you drop a Stockhausen piece into that ecosystem, it doesn’t feel like an artistic challenge, it feels like an attack.
There is no avant-garde music equivalent to Rothko in the mainstream because there’s no place for it to just be. Post Malone can perform for 40,000 people and no one’s confused. If someone played Xenakis at Coachella, half the crowd would think the speakers were broken and the other half would try to sue Live Nation for emotional damage. That’s the difference.
And that’s the core issue. Stubbs gets close to it, but he never quite spells it out: music is held to a higher standard of emotional legibility because we live inside it. We expect it to reflect our feelings back at us. So when it doesn’t (when it refuses to) it doesn’t just confuse people. It offends them. That’s why they say Stockhausen isn’t music. Not because they’re stupid or closed-minded. But because he’s violating an unspoken agreement: music is supposed to understand me.
The only people who get viscerally angry at modern visual art are the kind of people who never actually engage with it. When climate activists throw soup at a Van Gogh, it’s not a protest against art, it’s a protest through art. The medium is incidental. The rage is borrowed. No one’s trying to cancel Kandinsky.
Music, though? Music is different. Music is everywhere. It's not a niche indulgence or a weekend activity. It’s the dominant cultural currency. It’s in your car, your AirPods, your gym, your bar, your kid’s TikTok. People don’t just like music, they wrap their identities around it. They get tattoos of lyrics. They name their dogs after pop stars. They marry to it. So when you drop a Stockhausen piece into that ecosystem, it doesn’t feel like an artistic challenge, it feels like an attack.
There is no avant-garde music equivalent to Rothko in the mainstream because there’s no place for it to just be. Post Malone can perform for 40,000 people and no one’s confused. If someone played Xenakis at Coachella, half the crowd would think the speakers were broken and the other half would try to sue Live Nation for emotional damage. That’s the difference.
And that’s the core issue. Stubbs gets close to it, but he never quite spells it out: music is held to a higher standard of emotional legibility because we live inside it. We expect it to reflect our feelings back at us. So when it doesn’t (when it refuses to) it doesn’t just confuse people. It offends them. That’s why they say Stockhausen isn’t music. Not because they’re stupid or closed-minded. But because he’s violating an unspoken agreement: music is supposed to understand me.
October 12, 2024
In part a chronology, raising some interesting questions which seem even more pertinent now than when this was originally published (particularly those around climate, capitalism and funding of the arts). Quite keen to check out the new, expanded edition to see what's been added.
Read
November 13, 2024no longer afraid
February 17, 2025
3.5
Racist sentiments and west oriented
Okay intro to experimental music
Racist sentiments and west oriented
Okay intro to experimental music
November 22, 2021
The opening chapter—which addresses the question implied in the subtitle—is intriguing.
But 15 pages does not make a book...and I get the feeling Stubbs realized this and decided to fill out this still rather-thin item with a playlist of his favorite avant-garde-ish artists in all genres—which constitutes the extended middle of this book. (I will say that one could do worse than to use this book to build such a playlist.) Here, though, Stubbs loses points by over-frequent snide remarks directed at his dislikes (notably prog-rockers who, it seems, offend particularly due to their alleged fondness for large sideburns and wide flared trousers. I wish that were a joke).
It's only in the last chapter that Stubbs gets to some fundamental differences in the way we behold visual vs. audio art that begin to explain the question he sets out to address. He derails himself with some vaguely leftish hand-wringing about the way modern art has become a fashionable accessory of the extremely wealthy. He attributes this development, in part, to the way art can be fetishized in its singularity (evoking a simplified notion of Walter Benjamin's idea of the "aura"). This is a plausible idea—you can pay however many millions for a work of visual art, and the corporate heads and political leaders you entertain may be impressed, whereas inviting them to a soirée at which Einstürzende Neubauten provides the music would work...much less well. Of course he's not the first critic to make this observation about modernist visual art; still, this section would have been more interesting had he explored visual art that works against such commodification and "auratization." He also mentions briefly a few musicians who've vainly attempted to make their music impossible to reproduce...but again, doesn't really explore the possibilities here in much depth.
He does not explore a basic inconsistency hidden by his title, which is that some arguably avant-garde music has become broadly accepted by the general public, at least in some contexts (minimalism and its descendants, especially—but even some more difficult modernist musical gestures...so long as they're contextualized in, say, soundtrack work, where avant-garde sounds like those of Ligeti and Penderecki effectively evoke darkness, fear, and horror. (Or—unaddressed because written after this book—Brian Reitzell's strikingly modernist score for the 'Hannibal' series, uncannily effective in evoking visceral terror and psychological dysfunction.) And at the same time, some visual art remains unaccepted by the general public, even in high-end corporate boardrooms, sometimes because its very nature renders it uncollectible (conceptual art, landscape art, performance art) and other times because its bluntness of material or theme make it unsuitable. So, in fact, while people might get Rothko and many people may not get Stockhausen, people do not get Jeff Koons and do get Steve Reich.
The book was written in 2009—too bad because, as it turns out, music has become more and more evanescent and immaterial, to the detriment of musicians' abilities to make a living on their music. (And a book on whether it's actually a good idea if artists of any type can "make a living" from their art—indeed, whether any of us should be compelled to do so—would be interesting...but not this book at all.)
And yes, as many have noted, the proofreading is atrocious.
But 15 pages does not make a book...and I get the feeling Stubbs realized this and decided to fill out this still rather-thin item with a playlist of his favorite avant-garde-ish artists in all genres—which constitutes the extended middle of this book. (I will say that one could do worse than to use this book to build such a playlist.) Here, though, Stubbs loses points by over-frequent snide remarks directed at his dislikes (notably prog-rockers who, it seems, offend particularly due to their alleged fondness for large sideburns and wide flared trousers. I wish that were a joke).
It's only in the last chapter that Stubbs gets to some fundamental differences in the way we behold visual vs. audio art that begin to explain the question he sets out to address. He derails himself with some vaguely leftish hand-wringing about the way modern art has become a fashionable accessory of the extremely wealthy. He attributes this development, in part, to the way art can be fetishized in its singularity (evoking a simplified notion of Walter Benjamin's idea of the "aura"). This is a plausible idea—you can pay however many millions for a work of visual art, and the corporate heads and political leaders you entertain may be impressed, whereas inviting them to a soirée at which Einstürzende Neubauten provides the music would work...much less well. Of course he's not the first critic to make this observation about modernist visual art; still, this section would have been more interesting had he explored visual art that works against such commodification and "auratization." He also mentions briefly a few musicians who've vainly attempted to make their music impossible to reproduce...but again, doesn't really explore the possibilities here in much depth.
He does not explore a basic inconsistency hidden by his title, which is that some arguably avant-garde music has become broadly accepted by the general public, at least in some contexts (minimalism and its descendants, especially—but even some more difficult modernist musical gestures...so long as they're contextualized in, say, soundtrack work, where avant-garde sounds like those of Ligeti and Penderecki effectively evoke darkness, fear, and horror. (Or—unaddressed because written after this book—Brian Reitzell's strikingly modernist score for the 'Hannibal' series, uncannily effective in evoking visceral terror and psychological dysfunction.) And at the same time, some visual art remains unaccepted by the general public, even in high-end corporate boardrooms, sometimes because its very nature renders it uncollectible (conceptual art, landscape art, performance art) and other times because its bluntness of material or theme make it unsuitable. So, in fact, while people might get Rothko and many people may not get Stockhausen, people do not get Jeff Koons and do get Steve Reich.
The book was written in 2009—too bad because, as it turns out, music has become more and more evanescent and immaterial, to the detriment of musicians' abilities to make a living on their music. (And a book on whether it's actually a good idea if artists of any type can "make a living" from their art—indeed, whether any of us should be compelled to do so—would be interesting...but not this book at all.)
And yes, as many have noted, the proofreading is atrocious.
December 1, 2025
It was a Christmas present from a dear friend: an updated edition of a 2009 book by David Stubbs called Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen. The title promises insights into two art forms that tap into the non-literal and defy attempts by writers to make sense of them.
Would I like it? she asked. I’m not sure, I said, but I’ll read it.
I’ve read a lot about art, but little that tells me how to think or feel about its craft. Ditto – even more so – with music. Maybe Stubbs could help.
The book starts with the premise that modern art is now mainstream, prominently exhibited, traded at important galleries for big bucks, no longer “difficult.” The equivalent in modern music is difficult – and it isn’t box office. Stubbs means the stuff by Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen, but also the new jazz of Ornette Coleman in 1960, the hardest edges of punk, and, in the 2023 “Afterword”, the “Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra No. 1,” by someone called DJ Switch. Why is that?
As a student, I loved the idea of John Cage’s non-piece 4’33”. Having listened to it performed live once and “got” the idea, I have never felt a need to listen to it again.
The book’s subtitle sets expectations. Rothko’s paintings: abstract, non-representational, subtle; all vague attempts to put into words the sensation of seeing them falter. Stockhausen’s orchestral music: atonal, whatever that means, but lacking melody, harmony, repetition; his electronic compositions resisting human touch. One of the book’s most welcome surprises, however, was an introduction to the music of a guy going by the name of Merle Hazard, very near the end. I leapt to search out his tune, typing “Merle Haggard” by mistake. Gotcha!
Merle Hazard isn’t Merle Haggard. He’s a self-described “cowboy-economist” with a wicked sense of humor. Yes, he sings country music like his namesake. Read the rest of the review at https://donnordbergwriting.substack.c...
Would I like it? she asked. I’m not sure, I said, but I’ll read it.
I’ve read a lot about art, but little that tells me how to think or feel about its craft. Ditto – even more so – with music. Maybe Stubbs could help.
The book starts with the premise that modern art is now mainstream, prominently exhibited, traded at important galleries for big bucks, no longer “difficult.” The equivalent in modern music is difficult – and it isn’t box office. Stubbs means the stuff by Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen, but also the new jazz of Ornette Coleman in 1960, the hardest edges of punk, and, in the 2023 “Afterword”, the “Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra No. 1,” by someone called DJ Switch. Why is that?
As a student, I loved the idea of John Cage’s non-piece 4’33”. Having listened to it performed live once and “got” the idea, I have never felt a need to listen to it again.
The book’s subtitle sets expectations. Rothko’s paintings: abstract, non-representational, subtle; all vague attempts to put into words the sensation of seeing them falter. Stockhausen’s orchestral music: atonal, whatever that means, but lacking melody, harmony, repetition; his electronic compositions resisting human touch. One of the book’s most welcome surprises, however, was an introduction to the music of a guy going by the name of Merle Hazard, very near the end. I leapt to search out his tune, typing “Merle Haggard” by mistake. Gotcha!
Merle Hazard isn’t Merle Haggard. He’s a self-described “cowboy-economist” with a wicked sense of humor. Yes, he sings country music like his namesake. Read the rest of the review at https://donnordbergwriting.substack.c...
August 29, 2024
Stubbs does well to maintain a reader's initial (admittedly) deep interest in such a fascinating topic for musicians, artists, and psychologists alike. It is only unfortunate that then, just like the poor students of Stubbs' disco subjected to Sun Ra's cosmology, I can't help but feeling a little catfished. The momentum of the first chapter very quickly fizzles out into a simple narrative of some styles of Western music in the 20th century, mostly laconic in academic detail and always irrelevant to the topic. 5 chapters in, it seems Stubbs just throws the word Dadaism without any coherence, as if he were a hungover scholar realising they have forgotten the point of the essay 3000 words in.
To give him credit (and 3 stars), Stubbs does at least tell the reader in the introduction that he will not offer the answers, and simply hopes to induce questions. Unfortunately, this seems to actually be truthful, in that the heavy lifting is entirely borne by the reader. It feels a little like if Dickens simply published a dictionary, and invited readers to make their own story up. Why publish a book whose very title is a question you do not attempt to even dwell on?
The proofreading and editing is also abhorrent. Many sentences do not make any sense and seem to have been chopped in half (in a very Avant Garde way), and spliced together with something else. One almost hopes that the entire joke is that the book is itself an extension of the avant garde's rejection of form or art.
Perhaps this is a little too critical - the conclusion warrants it's length as 1/4 of the length of the book as it does actually (finally!) pose some relevant points as to why avant garde music is not as desirable as avant garde art. It is only a shame that the 3 points Stubbs come up with are much the same 3 that many others would think of before reading the book.
Do say: I have at least found a new wealth of 20th century avant garde composers and artists to take interest in.
Don't say: I can't wait to DJ my next concert!
To give him credit (and 3 stars), Stubbs does at least tell the reader in the introduction that he will not offer the answers, and simply hopes to induce questions. Unfortunately, this seems to actually be truthful, in that the heavy lifting is entirely borne by the reader. It feels a little like if Dickens simply published a dictionary, and invited readers to make their own story up. Why publish a book whose very title is a question you do not attempt to even dwell on?
The proofreading and editing is also abhorrent. Many sentences do not make any sense and seem to have been chopped in half (in a very Avant Garde way), and spliced together with something else. One almost hopes that the entire joke is that the book is itself an extension of the avant garde's rejection of form or art.
Perhaps this is a little too critical - the conclusion warrants it's length as 1/4 of the length of the book as it does actually (finally!) pose some relevant points as to why avant garde music is not as desirable as avant garde art. It is only a shame that the 3 points Stubbs come up with are much the same 3 that many others would think of before reading the book.
Do say: I have at least found a new wealth of 20th century avant garde composers and artists to take interest in.
Don't say: I can't wait to DJ my next concert!
July 24, 2019
I usually enjoy Stubbs' work but this is poor. The initial premise ('why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen') is an intriguing one that he doesn't (can't?) follow through and after the pretty good first chapter, it ends up being a scrappy history of experimental music with the odd reference to Warhol or Walter Benjamin chucked in. It's also badly written, barely edited, full of non sequiturs and threads that go nowhere. There's a good book to be written about this, but Fear Of Music isn't it.
June 12, 2018
Feels a little unfocused at times and can often be somewhat overwhelming in the sheer volume of information it provides in its short length. Introduction and conclusion aside, it is very much a parallel history of avant-garde music and avant-garde art. Only in the closing pages do we receive an 'argument'. Still, an engagingly (often poetically) written, thought-provoking, informative and well informed book. (Just wish Zer0 would edit their books better!!)
February 15, 2021
Stubbs si v podtitulu pokládá lákavou otázku: jak je možné, že lidé berou avantgardní výtvarné umění, ale ne už avantgardní hudbu. V první kapitole téma skvěle otevírá, ale potom z něj rychle uteče a po většinu knihy zkratkovitě, i když čtivě, zpracovává vývoj hudební avantgardy (od Schönberga po Aphex Twin) s občasnými výlety do oblasti výtvarného umění. Dostal jsem se tak sice k řadě mně doposud neznámých jmen, po zmíněném úvodu jsem ale očekával něco jiného.
June 2, 2021
4* for the first half, 2.5* for the second half. But definitely worth a read overall if you care about progressive music. Captures so many important overlooked noise artists of the 20th century in a pretty succinct, passionate, generally self-aware style. The stuff about the Oxford scout and stockhausen is unfortunate though but you get the sense that the author is aware. Someone should make a Spotify playlist capturing every track mentioned - that would be incredible.
January 3, 2025
A book that gets worse by the chapter, as Stubbs starts off trying to explain why visual arts are allowed to be left-field and abstract, but music isn't. Instead, though, he just namedrops bands and composers that you can go and listen to, while Stubbs gives copious (and often excessive) context on when those artists popped up but fails to contextualize why, exactly, lovers of visual art struggle to embrace audio the same way.
October 21, 2018
Too thin, Rooster. Too thin.
Iffy attempt at explaining dissonance between the visual and the auditory using an awkward slice of artists and bands. Skip to the conclusion, which would’ve been a fine blog post.
Iffy attempt at explaining dissonance between the visual and the auditory using an awkward slice of artists and bands. Skip to the conclusion, which would’ve been a fine blog post.
May 22, 2020
Partially disconnected essays about art and music that don't go a long way towards answering the titular question but are nonetheless interesting. Got me to listen to Can and Webern again and discover Bruno Maderna and Psychedelic Horseshit. So that's all good.
August 28, 2022
Not nearly as good as Stubbs' brilliant "Future Days", still a good overview of "New" Music of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Spoiler: He does not answer the book's subtitle...which is unanswerable.
Spoiler: He does not answer the book's subtitle...which is unanswerable.
June 30, 2024
Reasonably interesting in places, but the central question of why people 'get' conceptual visual art but not music wasn't even considered until the book's very end ...
... and even then it was dealt with badly ...
... and even then it was dealt with badly ...
August 30, 2020
First few chapters are very good, then goes fully into middle aged man music critic mode with an irrelevant and way too long middle section about the history of krautrock and post punk.
April 19, 2021
A bit light on the art side of the coin.
June 25, 2021
Decent, but got weirdly rightwing at the end.
July 28, 2023
Really enjoyed it!
Funny and passionate, good insight and lots to take away
Funny and passionate, good insight and lots to take away
July 2, 2024
This a readable and informative opinion piece. It is mystery as to why it is published as philosophy. It offers no deep analysis or insight into "Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen".
August 9, 2025
undeniable thesis on abstract music & sound art, with tangents aplenty & a sense of humour
May 9, 2013
I can never be entirely decisive on these star ratings; two or three stars? The author does make some points, but in the end he neither seems to have really addressed the issue posed in the title, and some points are severely under-explored.
At 137 pages, "Fear of Music" feels like either an essay that's been padded, or a full length book that hasn't been developed. He's clearly coming from the music end of things (as am I) and sometimes writes a sort of primer on new and avant garde music trends. I can understand devoting a page and a half to Sun Ra, something I personally don't need to have explained, but by comparison he doesn't write in detail nearly as much about visual artists. On the other hand, there is a passing reference to noise/power electronics groups, but doesn't actually name any of them (presumably Whitehouse and their ilk; it's almost as if they were so unsavory that he didn't want to mention them by name). The author also places a tremendous importance on post-punk music. While I like some of the groups he writes about in that passage, it seemed oddly weighted on this particular point.
So what do I believe is missing here? I want to be considerate; I don't necessarily find it fair to review what a book is not, more what it is. That being said...I would start by saying that he never addresses why people DO get Rothko, instead describing the spectacle of the Rothko room at the Tate Modern, and the greed to own such artworks on the part of the wealthy and corporations. Nor does he go into detail why people might get Stockhausen.
Fleetingly he makes a point about the difference in level of focus and concentration of experiencing a painting, as opposed to listening to an extended Stockhausen work. It's underdeveloped. I would argue that all music, perhaps all temporally-based art, requires a greater level of concentration than experiencing any still painting or sculpture. One can be highly moved by, say, "Guernica", or a great Rothko painting, but the viewer experiences it on his/her own time frame. You walk up, walk back, look around it, leave, come back; it's not really imposing time on you. Even a Mozart symphony, relatively undissonant to modern ears, requires the listener to patiently sit and experience the work over a period of time.
As mentioned previously, the author makes some mention of noise, but doesn't fully expand on ideas of what noise is, what its place is in music, and what its effect is. Composer Anne LeBaron once said to me, noise in composition is one of the two major developments in 20th century composition. (I forget what the other was, chance techniques perhaps?)
As I think has been mentioned in other reviews, technically speaking this book is in serious need of proper editing. There are randomly placed mid-sentence paragraph breaks scattered throughout the book. It's sloppy publishing and doesn't serve a purpose here (unlike, say, the William Burroughs essay that uses no punctuation, or my friend tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's dissections and reassemblages of the written word). Stubbs has a bad tendency to write extended, run-on sentences, and that's coming from someone who tends to write run-on sentences.
Recommendation? Don't run out for this, but if you come across it at the library, it might be worth paging through.
At 137 pages, "Fear of Music" feels like either an essay that's been padded, or a full length book that hasn't been developed. He's clearly coming from the music end of things (as am I) and sometimes writes a sort of primer on new and avant garde music trends. I can understand devoting a page and a half to Sun Ra, something I personally don't need to have explained, but by comparison he doesn't write in detail nearly as much about visual artists. On the other hand, there is a passing reference to noise/power electronics groups, but doesn't actually name any of them (presumably Whitehouse and their ilk; it's almost as if they were so unsavory that he didn't want to mention them by name). The author also places a tremendous importance on post-punk music. While I like some of the groups he writes about in that passage, it seemed oddly weighted on this particular point.
So what do I believe is missing here? I want to be considerate; I don't necessarily find it fair to review what a book is not, more what it is. That being said...I would start by saying that he never addresses why people DO get Rothko, instead describing the spectacle of the Rothko room at the Tate Modern, and the greed to own such artworks on the part of the wealthy and corporations. Nor does he go into detail why people might get Stockhausen.
Fleetingly he makes a point about the difference in level of focus and concentration of experiencing a painting, as opposed to listening to an extended Stockhausen work. It's underdeveloped. I would argue that all music, perhaps all temporally-based art, requires a greater level of concentration than experiencing any still painting or sculpture. One can be highly moved by, say, "Guernica", or a great Rothko painting, but the viewer experiences it on his/her own time frame. You walk up, walk back, look around it, leave, come back; it's not really imposing time on you. Even a Mozart symphony, relatively undissonant to modern ears, requires the listener to patiently sit and experience the work over a period of time.
As mentioned previously, the author makes some mention of noise, but doesn't fully expand on ideas of what noise is, what its place is in music, and what its effect is. Composer Anne LeBaron once said to me, noise in composition is one of the two major developments in 20th century composition. (I forget what the other was, chance techniques perhaps?)
As I think has been mentioned in other reviews, technically speaking this book is in serious need of proper editing. There are randomly placed mid-sentence paragraph breaks scattered throughout the book. It's sloppy publishing and doesn't serve a purpose here (unlike, say, the William Burroughs essay that uses no punctuation, or my friend tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's dissections and reassemblages of the written word). Stubbs has a bad tendency to write extended, run-on sentences, and that's coming from someone who tends to write run-on sentences.
Recommendation? Don't run out for this, but if you come across it at the library, it might be worth paging through.
July 2, 2012
I enjoyed this book, but the proof-reader was asleep I think when he nodded it through, which is a wee bit frustrating getting pulled up by strange punctuation and split sentences.
He acknowledges at the outset that the book doesn't purport to be a comprehensive catalogue of modern/ experimental music. The chapter on early 20th century modern classical music got me tracking down some music I hadn't come across before, eg Xenakis, but the later chapters used far weaker examples, going on a bit about some fairly run of the mill music whilst overlooking some more obvious examples. There was an interesting discussion on how the visual arts achieved success by putting a price on things, which musicians find harder to do. This also is discussed later on in the hypocrisy tied up in the corporate sponsorship of the arts. The conclusion briefly mentions the strong position of women in modern electronic music and brief mention is given to some Japanese musicians, two areas which could have been explored more at the expense of other stuff.
At the end of the day I prefer it when there is overlap and cross-pollenation in the arts and people aren't pigeon-holed as a 'type'. I can only illustrate that by saying that whilst writing this I am listening to Max Richter's "infra", which I first heard as incidental music at the theatre last week, the National Theatre of Scotland doing Macbeth, and the cd cover is a picture by Julian Opie. It works for me.
He acknowledges at the outset that the book doesn't purport to be a comprehensive catalogue of modern/ experimental music. The chapter on early 20th century modern classical music got me tracking down some music I hadn't come across before, eg Xenakis, but the later chapters used far weaker examples, going on a bit about some fairly run of the mill music whilst overlooking some more obvious examples. There was an interesting discussion on how the visual arts achieved success by putting a price on things, which musicians find harder to do. This also is discussed later on in the hypocrisy tied up in the corporate sponsorship of the arts. The conclusion briefly mentions the strong position of women in modern electronic music and brief mention is given to some Japanese musicians, two areas which could have been explored more at the expense of other stuff.
At the end of the day I prefer it when there is overlap and cross-pollenation in the arts and people aren't pigeon-holed as a 'type'. I can only illustrate that by saying that whilst writing this I am listening to Max Richter's "infra", which I first heard as incidental music at the theatre last week, the National Theatre of Scotland doing Macbeth, and the cd cover is a picture by Julian Opie. It works for me.
December 15, 2012
The best thing about this book is the title and the question it poses. Sadly the book doesn't really make but a cursory effort toward answering this intriguing question.
The book starts off nicely enough, setting up the reader to expect an exploration of cultural attitudes about music and art, and instead most of the book is wasted on a stunted rehashing of the history of avant-garde music, with a very biased view of the more recent developments in countercultural sound (punk: GOOD / prog: BAD).
Only in the conclusion of the book are a few pages tossed off addressing the central question, and it seems hasty and shallow.
Other reviewers have made note of the bad editing job, I'd have to echo that criticism, the weird line breaks, odd sentence construction, typos, repetitions and other errors really become distracting during the course of the read.
The writing style is... easygoing.
Might be a good book for someone new to the subject. It is an approachable piece of writing, if somewhat misleading and misfired.
ETA: Others have mentioned and I agree; that this review may is not only spot on, but may be more informative than the book itself: http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009/0...
The book starts off nicely enough, setting up the reader to expect an exploration of cultural attitudes about music and art, and instead most of the book is wasted on a stunted rehashing of the history of avant-garde music, with a very biased view of the more recent developments in countercultural sound (punk: GOOD / prog: BAD).
Only in the conclusion of the book are a few pages tossed off addressing the central question, and it seems hasty and shallow.
Other reviewers have made note of the bad editing job, I'd have to echo that criticism, the weird line breaks, odd sentence construction, typos, repetitions and other errors really become distracting during the course of the read.
The writing style is... easygoing.
Might be a good book for someone new to the subject. It is an approachable piece of writing, if somewhat misleading and misfired.
ETA: Others have mentioned and I agree; that this review may is not only spot on, but may be more informative than the book itself: http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009/0...
September 28, 2015
Like a lot of books that purport to tell WHY something happens, this one just reports that things DO happen. &, I'm sorry to say, in this book David Stubbs doesn't even do that very well.
His understanding of art history is limited (as an example, the dynamic between photography and painting is a lot more complex than Stubbs claims) and a lot of his music references are not much deeper. A comparison of the general reception of contemporary visual art and contemporary music deserves more thought and study than is exhibited here.
And, yes, this has to be one of the most poorly proofread books to be released by a commercial publisher.
His understanding of art history is limited (as an example, the dynamic between photography and painting is a lot more complex than Stubbs claims) and a lot of his music references are not much deeper. A comparison of the general reception of contemporary visual art and contemporary music deserves more thought and study than is exhibited here.
And, yes, this has to be one of the most poorly proofread books to be released by a commercial publisher.
June 2, 2009
A book of misplaced commas. A book in desperate need of an editor or anyone with a pair of functioning eyes and rudimentary knowledge of grammar and syntax. A book with ridiculous premise and lack of coherent argument to support it. Instead of argument, what we get is Wikipedia-style Cliff Notes on the history of modern music and modern art.
Do read this instead:
http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009/0...
Do read this instead:
http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009/0...
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