![]() But there is no longer a sense of tonalities colliding. In them may be discerned traces of the bifurcated scale that begins Salome. The movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone. For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating the crucial line is 'Alles ist hin' (all is lost). It contains fragments of the folk song 'Ach, du lieber Augustin'-the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music at the time. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. Take Ross's description of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, "in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forming in front of him. Not only does Ross manage to give historical, biographical, and social context to 20th-century pieces both major and minor, he brings the scores alive in language that's accessible and dramatic. Anyone who has ever gamely tried and failed to absorb, enjoy, and-especially-understand the complex works of Schoenberg, Mahler, Strauss, or even Philip Glass will allow themselves a wry smile reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross's outstanding The Rest Is Noise. ![]()
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