RIA Novosti

WHEN Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue” had its première in 1924, at a concert in New York that was billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music”, the audience included Rachmaninov and other big names from the classical world. By all accounts, the experiment was a success. It established that jazz could be worthy of the concert hall. Four years later in Europe, Gershwin met more of his new admirers, including Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev and two composers of the revolutionary Second Viennese School, Schoenberg and Berg. Awed by Berg, Gershwin hesitated at the piano one night, nervous about playing his catchy songs before one of the deconstructors of conventional harmony. Berg sternly encouraged him: “Mr Gershwin, music is music.”

If only it were that simple, writes Alex Ross, the New Yorker's music critic, in his history of music in the 20th century. He notes that musical life in the past 100 years has “disintegrated into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon.” The cultures may sometimes meet on affable terms, but the results can be comic in their incongruity. In the 1930s, when much of the European artistic elite was holed up in Hollywood, Fanny Brice, a comedienne, strolled over to Schoenberg at a dinner given by Harpo Marx: “C'mon, professor, play us a tune.”

It would be hard to imagine a better guide to the maelstrom of recent music than Mr Ross, who worked on this book for a decade. He has an almost uncanny gift for putting music into words. No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording. And his reporter's nose and exhaustive research result in more telling vignettes and notable anecdotes per chapter than any reader has a right to expect.

Mr Ross notices that Gustav Mahler, who came from a Jewish background, was at the podium when Adolf Hitler saw Wagner's “Tristan and Isolde” in Vienna on May 8th 1906, an experience that prompted Hitler to decide to study opera direction and painting in Vienna. (Unfortunately, that career-plan did not work out.) He notices that some photographs of Hitler's oratorical poses show a suggestive resemblance to Mahler's conducting style. And he notices that a prisoners' orchestra that played for SS officers in Auschwitz in 1942, and captivated Josef Mengele, was led by Mahler's niece, Alma Rosé, who died in the concentration camp.

War and politics visibly intertwined with music in the 20th century, under totalitarianism and after it. As Mr Ross documents, classical music blared constantly in the choreographed background to Nazi life. For a time, the classical repertoire was deemed to have lost its moral stature because of the Nazis' embrace. This was one reason why some composers tried to scrap classical forms and explore the alternatives, leading to the dissonant pandemonium of experimental music in the 1950s. Theodor Adorno, a left-wing sociologist and musician, wrote in 1949 that preserving tonality betrayed a fascist mentality.

Under Stalin, Soviet art was rigorously policed to ensure that it reflected Soviet ideology. Shostakovich was accused of “formalism”: Soviet-speak for any style that seemed too close to Western modernism. He was one of the few censured Soviet artists to survive the purges.

Post-war democracy had its (less pernicious) musical agenda, too. The psychological-warfare unit of America's occupation government in Germany and Austria worked to minimise the influence of tainted composers, such as Richard Strauss, who had unwisely thanked God when Hitler came to power: “Finally, a Reich chancellor who is interested in art!”

Sibelius's “Finlandia” was banned, in case it rekindled feelings of Nordic supremacy. American music, such as the work of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, was encouraged. In the early 1960s, when America wanted to show that capitalism and high culture were compatible, music became a weapon in the cold war. As Mr Ross puts it, the arms race expanded into a science race and then a culture race. Much of the impetus for the millions of dollars spent on cultural infrastructure came from the Kennedy administration—although Jacqueline Kennedy once quipped that the only music that the president really liked was “Hail to the Chief”.

Mr Ross says that his aim is to provide a history of the 20th century through its music, not just a history of the music itself. In this he succeeds magnificently, at least for classical music and its closest cousins. Yet, as he knows, a large part of the story of the past century belongs to pop and rock, which get only walk-on parts here, albeit excellently drawn ones. He is especially adept at describing the cross-fertilisation of genres—how classical minimalism affected popular music through such intermediaries as Lou Reed and Brian Eno, for example.

There are tantalising hints that he has much to say about the classical-popular divide. Classical composers, he writes, are now looking for the place between the life of the mind and the noise of the street. They may never match the instant impact of pop, but “in the freedom of their solitude, they can communicate experiences of singular intensity.” If only he would tell us more. This is not a complaint, but a request for an encore.