Plunging into the hurly-burly

‘Avoiding both the pigeon hole and the blackboard I have tried to trace a connecting line between the apparently diverse and contradictory manifestations of contemporary music,’ wrote the composer and conductor Constant Lambert in the preface to Music ho!, his marvellously breezy survey of modern music published in 1934. Some 70 years later, the New Yorker’s brilliant critic Alex Ross has tried to do very much the same thing, covering the broader canvas of the entire 20th century and a musical hurly-burly which can no longer be drawn into a single ‘connecting line’: Ross’ own preface talks instead of a disintegration ‘into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures’. There is no over-arching thesis here, only the patient effort to listen to — and make sense of — a staggering variety of created sounds.

Like Lambert, Ross makes an urbane and companionable guide to this bizarre jungle. He writes with unfailing grace and clarity for a non-specialist audience (there is some technical stuff, but those who don’t know a tone-row from their elbow will not find it wearisome) and he alludes without pretension or glibness to a wide range of aesthetic, social and political contexts.