Julia J.’s Reviews > The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century > Status Update

The chapter on Shostakovich and Prokofiev in Stalinist Russia was deeply moving

“‘Every day I have seen the cranes. Flying south in full cry with their music. Have been yet again their most assiduous pupil. Their cries echo throughout my being.’ When, on the third-to-last day of his life, the cranes duly appeared, [Sibelius] told his wife, ‘Here they come, the birds of my youth!’ One of them broke from the flock, circled the house, cried out, and flew away.”

Sibelius recorded in his notebook next two a description of 16 swans flying over his home: “One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, that beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming, silver ribbon. . . That this should have happened to me, who have so long been the outsider. . . The swans are always in my thoughts and give splendor to [my] life.”

“Composing is a difficult business. …a laborious traversal of an imaginary landscape. What emerges is an artwork in code, which other musicians must be persuaded to unravel. Unlike a novel or painting, a score gives up its full meaning only when it is performed in front of an audience; it’s a child of loneliness that lives off crowds. Nameless terrors creep into the limbo between composition and performance.”

Bartók, 1926: “Recently I have felt so stupid, so dazed, so empty-headed that I have truly doubted whether I am able to write anything new at all anymore. All the tangled chaos that the musical periodicals vomit thick and fast about the music of today has come to weigh heavily on me: the watchwords, linear, horizontal, vertical, objective, impersonal, polyphonic, homophonic, tonal, polytonal…”
Relating in 2026

Pretending he was writing a biography of Schoenberg instead of working on an opera that Schoenberg disapproved of, then encoding Schoenberg into the opera as the evil doctor and himself (Berg) as the maligned main character is TOO iconic

“On one occasion Berg had trouble keeping a straight face when his comrade-in-arms Webern, at a rehearsal of his Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor saxophone, and piano, Opus 22 told the saxophonist to play a descending major seventh with ‘sex appeal.’ Berg feigned an asthma attack, fled the room, and burst into hysterical laughter.”