I’ve been aware of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard for a long time, but only in the past few days have I decided to try the layout for myself. Like any cognitive realignment pushing against the momentum of a lifelong habit, the initial adjustment process has been slow and occasionally punishing. When you are acccustomed to the fluidity of the keyboard as an invisible extension of the mind, it’s terrifying to find it amputated and clumsily reattached. I expect this overwhelming self-consciousness to be the norm someday when future generations willingly trade in their limbs for more dynamic cyborg substitutes.

Up to now, the closest I’ve come to this awkward stumbling was when I attempted to train my left-hand dexterity on Charlie Parker melodies I would normally play with my right. A kind of impotence, really: I was willing myself to do things that I was used to executing at dizzying velocities with ease, but my body just wouldn’t respond. The trick, I discovered, is to force yourself to slow down, clean up the suddenly naked particulars, and not rely so much on your established ‘chunks’ of muscle memory. My left hand is still a shambles, mind you, but as the lesser automaton it invents the more colourful passages.

That’s why I’m still plugging away in Dvorak. It may be slow-going at first—this post you are reading now is taking an eternity to punch in—but within minutes of playing with it, you begin to perceive all sorts of qualitative pleasures that simply don’t exist in QWERTY-land. It’s like switching to an Apple Macintosh, complete with the moment of epiphany where the cultishness of the already indoctrinated looks reasonable all of a sudden. (Or so I’ve heard. Having been a Mac user on and off since the age of five, I can’t really say.)

Patented in 1936, the Dvorak keyboard was designed around a handful of basic principles. High-frequency characters reside on the home row (middle row) to minimize squashing and stretching. Vowels and common punctuation marks sit together on the left, encouraging the alternation of hands from one character to the next; one hand presses keys while the other hand repositions. Finally, synergistic pairs like the digraphs ch and th are packed in close proximity. (In the original design, the arrangement of the number row fell on the axis of an outward spiral, reading 7531902468 from left to right. Even Dvorak’s adherents conceded that was silly, and it has largely been dropped.)

Dvorak users will often tell you two things. The first is that the layout’s ergonomics are a vast improvement on QWERTY, allowing you to push your typing to record speeds without incurring nearly the same risk of repetitive strain injuries. I can’t verify this myself; as someone who pulls a respectable 120 wpm in QWERTY, it’s unlikely that I’ll see efficiency gains in my typing habits anytime soon, and RSI has never been a problem for me thanks to my exclusive preference for lightweight, shallow keyboards.

Intuitively, the claims about Dvorak’s top-speed advantage sound plausible. Although the credibility of the original pro-Dvorak study has been questioned, notably in the 1990 paper “The Fable of the Keys” by SJ Liebowitz and Stephen E Margolis, the fact remains that the QWERTY layout was specifically “anti-engineered” by its inventor, Christopher Sholes, to split digraphs and spread common letters apart and thus avert key-jamming. In other words, it was designed to slow you down.

The second thing you’ll hear is that the Dvorak keyboard has nothing to do with the most notable figure to bear that name, the great romantic composer Antonín Dvořák. The keyboard’s designer, the Seattle-based educational psychologist August Dvorak, was a distant cousin at most—and that, we’re told, is all there is to the story.

This is where I disagree.

Key Largo

Most of the conversation you will find about the Dvorak layout portrays it as a case study in economics. If mass commercial standardization precludes the adoption of a considerable improvement in design, the argument goes, do free markets really foster innovation? Jared Diamond’s 1997 essay in Discover, “The Curse of QWERTY”, is a classic of the genre. Liebowitz and Margolis, in contrast, stay on the tack that QWERTY has remained triumphant simply because the alternatives aren’t discernibly better.

In either case, the way people tend to talk about Dvorak is invariably utilitarian, balancing the costs and benefits of adoption in the quantifiable parlance of character frequencies, finger mileages, relative activity by row, and above all, words per minute. Rarely will you hear specifics about the intangibles of the overall Dvorak experience, even among the few who swear by it. My impression is that many who praise Dvorak on principle don’t actively use it themselves—”I wish I knew how to qwert you!” rings the cri de cœur on Backspace Mountain—and testimonials among those who do typically say a few words about speed and comfort and leave it at that.

The closest thing I’ve seen to a lucid experiential observation is this article by Nicholas Thompson, in which he says:

Using a Dvorak after a lifetime of banging on a Qwerty is like removing a tiny pebble from your shoe. Writing a word such as “the” gives me a buzz as I roll my fingers to the left in a fluid, natural motion. The the the the.

The the the the. Thompson couldn’t have picked a better example; ‘the’ is the word that sold me on Dvorak. It rolls off your fingers like the spoken word rolls off your tongue as you flick it against the back of your teeth. Teeth teeth teeth teeth. But then he blunders:

For musicians, think about trying to play “Blowing in the Wind” starting with a B-flat ninth. That’s a Qwerty board. Now think about starting on a G chord. That’s a Dvorak board.

This makes no sense to me whatsoever. Were you to play “Blowing in the Wind” with a ninth on the initial tonic, the chord would reduce to a F6 or Dm7 over a B-flat root. Easy, comfortable, and far better than G on many instruments. I suspect Mr Thompson was a guitarist.

However poorly he may have worded it, Thompson had the right idea. Dvorak’s layout is more than a mere ergonomic reconfiguration. It proposes an entirely different way of thinking about typing. It makes the activity of typing musical. Dvorak, in a word, is like Dvořák.

Major Major Major Major

Experienced pianists have a way of detecting whether a composer is catering to their needs. In this respect, Frédéric Chopin comes up most often as the model composer for the instrument. Playing Chopin is like revenge: it isn’t easy by any means, but everybody covets the satisfaction of pulling it off. It’s easy to see why once you practice his works—his chords and patterns have an uncanny knack for fitting in the curve of your hand like a volley of fastballs perfectly aimed at the palm of a catcher’s mitt. The fingerings by and large suggest themselves. In the jazz world, Duke Ellington is the same way: construct the chords under a tune like “Mood Indigo” or “Prelude to a Kiss” and you find yourself pulled towards brilliant, open structures with voice-leading that magically clicks.

One neat little morsel of trivia about Chopin is that he liked to start new piano students on B major, which has the most idiosyncratic fingerings of any major scale if you learn the instrument according to the common pattern of starting with C major (no sharps or flats, and therefore no black keys) and adding accidentals as you get better, spreading out along the circle of fifths. In the usual progression, B major with its five sharps is introduced relatively late, and thus it has developed a reputation for being difficult.

Chopin, who frankly knew better than everyone, taught C major last. It’s the easiest key to read, he reasoned, but the hardest key to play. C-oriented thinking creates obstacles in the long run in real-world performance scenarios; better instead to begin with B, which develops the proper contour of the hand. This won’t seem like a big deal if you are anything like Eva van Crommelynck from David Mitchell’s novels and “couldn’t tell C major from a sergeant major,” but believe me, it is.

For Chopin, training for the eventual practicalities of expressing real ideas took priority over taking advantage of conventions that happened to be convenient now. You can probably see where I’m going with this. The Dvorak keyboard, you may notice, was conceived along similar pedagogic lines. It is a system where to work on fundamentals is to prepare yourself to tackle practical scenarios efficiently. Learn a few neighbouring characters at a time, starting with your hands in the rest position, and within minutes you already have the building blocks of words and phrases.

But it’s the clever arrangement of digraphs where Dvorak truly shines. This is something you pick up right away: drum the right hand on its natural resting place and you instantly glimpse the potential of legato typing. The t in nth is a passing tone; the s in sh, a colourful appoggiatura.

Even as a Dvorak novice, you don’t hunt and peck a character at a time. Instead, as you practice the layout you rapidly come to visualize phonemes and syllables, hammering them out in clumps. Strings like ‘Schubert’ feel like five keystrokes, not eight, but acronyms like QWERTY remain a nasty pickle. Pronounceables skip like stones on a pond; abbreviations are minefields daring you to tiptoe across. In essence, the rhythm of Dvorak imitates the rhythm of speech. Rhythm rhythm rhythm rhythm.

QWERTY has a rhythm of its own once you’re fluent, but as you accelerate you converge on the uniform staccato of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. There isn’t a way around this, either, as your pace is bounded by your fingers’ travel time. Typing in QWERTY is atomic at heart, decomposing into a succession of meaningless independent characters—quite unlike Dvorak, where vowels and consonants are demarcated by their very placement, and the phoneme reigns supreme.

We could almost think of the QWERTY map’s decentredness as twelve-tone serialism over a wider alphabet of possible notes, none of them privileged, no combination outwardly consonant or dissonant. By this analogy, switching to Dvorak is akin to witnessing music history play out in reverse, returning to a classical pianistic scheme of vowels in the left hand harmonizing a punctuated melody of consonants in the right.

And in tactile terms, that’s really how typing in Dvorak feels, only all the letter-chords are broken down sequentially. There are many obscure alternatives to QWERTY in the keyboard ecosystem, but perhaps why Dvorak has endured as the representative champion is its essential musicality. It’s the romantic keyboard, reminding us that beneath every typewritten palimpsest sleeps a sound.

It reveals an odd kind of poetry, too, when you first practice it in fridge-magnetic increments. “The idea that nineteen studious Dadaists assisted Einstein is asinine,” reads the cryptic aphorism of a home-row exercise. “This session is tedious on the tendons,” reads another.

And now for something completely different:

• Start with Michael Weingrad’s piece in The Jewish Review of Books about why there is no Jewish Narnia. Then proceed to Israeli sci-fi reviewer Abigail Nussbaum’s response and her survey of the conversation.

• My friend Stephen McCarthy, who is coaching Korean schoolchildren in the art of debate, writes about his cultural collision with corporal punishment.

• Anthony Gottlieb digests a survey of what philosophers believe. The data set covers English-speaking academia and skews heavily analytic, but I’m not one to complain.

• Not exactly “reading” per se, but it’s election time, and I can’t stop playing with The Guardian‘s lovely polling widget.

• Wikileaks is in the news again after releasing footage of American troops firing upon a Reuters photographer in Iraq. The BBC profiles who they are.

• John McWhorter parses Sarah Palin. Typically the way the print media scrubs audio quotations into coherent, well-formed sentences (or doesn’t) is a good indicator of media bias, but the thing about Palin is that it can’t be done.

• Julie Just asks where the parents have gone in fiction for young adults.

• What are marching bands playing these days? Shostakovich, that’s what.

• Dale Dougherty writes about the iPad and misses HyperCard. He’s not the only one.

• Cartoonist James Sturm leaves the Internet. I should do that too.

• Turn up your speakers and read Jan Swafford’s article in Slate about performing classical piano repertoire on classical pianos, which is full of audio comparisons that will make you wonder if the homogenized ideal of the modern Steinway grand is really a good thing.

• The Guardian asks a wide selection of novelists for their writing tips, which have a way of telling us more about the authors than about writing. Some of my favourites: Geoff Dyer (“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov”), Anne Enright (“The first 12 years are the worst”), Philip Pullman (“My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work”).

• Ben Goldacre shows us how regulating alternative folk medicine through requiring certification is no use at all when we don’t know what’s being certified.

• From The New York Times: Canadians shoot left, Americans shoot right. The article is about hockey players but I think there’s something bigger in this.

• Teresa Nielsen Hayden remarks on the imaginative poverty of failed authors who think suing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism is a good idea.

• Jonah Lehrer wonders if the direction of funding towards older scientists hinders us from tapping into the creativity of youth. Also read the followup on his Frontal Cortex blog.

• Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson talks about designing strategy games around our intuitions about probability (or lack thereof).

• Mark Chu-Carroll explains why computer simulations of biological phenomena will never replace animal testing.

• Joel Stickley’s explorations of bad writing by example finally catch on to my fatal flaw.

Last month I attended a performance of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s “documentary digital video opera” Three Tales at the ADC Theatre, the first production in Britain since the UK premiere in 2002. I’m still not sure what to make of it.

On the surface it looks straightforward enough. The 65-minute composition for voice, acoustic instruments, and video divides neatly into three segments on subjects from the public face of twentieth-century technology—the Hindenburg disaster, the atomic bomb test in the Bikini Atoll, and the cloning of Dolly the sheep. We hear the familiar Reich technique of displacing and superimposing copies of repeated motifs slightly out of phase, which catches the ear well enough in recordings but in live performance has the air of a magic trick. As in Reich’s seminal string quartet Different Trains, many of the melodic ideas are derived from the pitches and articulation of human speech—but not, in Three Tales, the rhythms; here, the speech recordings are subtended to click into the frame of a regular pulse. The video speed, too, is synchronized to musical time and not “mimetic” time or real-time, if you get my meaning.

We see some captivating archival images in the first two movements, chiefly the ones that draw attention to the logistics of large-scale technology, like the construction of the Hindenburg (set to variations on the Nibelung motif from Wagner’s Ring) or the dislocation of indigenous people and livestock in preparation for the Bikini tests (with thunderous sforzandi from Genesis to spice things up). What I can’t quite fit into the picture is the Dolly movement, a contrapuntal collage of video interviews with prominent scientists like Richard Dawkins, Marvin Minsky, and Rodney Brooks. Korot tells us the work, as it was conceived, is more accurately called “Two Tales and a Talk”. Here’s how Reich described it:

Each of the three acts not only looks and sounds like it’s historical period, each is formally organized quite differently to comment on that period. [...] [Dolly] is non-stop with certain kinds of material recurring in no clearly discernible pattern. Musically one might say Dolly was a kind of free rondo. The forms of each act reflect the historical period they describe.

But what does the piece say about technology? It sets up a debate instead of taking a firm position, adopting the ambivalence that is often so necessary for art to say anything at all. Commentators have remarked on the obvious irony of critiquing technology in a technologically enabled medium, but I think it would be facile to stop there: as in most of his earlier works, Reich’s crucial gesture is to forsake electronic synthesizers and recreate the effects of audio manipulation in acoustic human performance. It is an incursion of man on the domain of machine, not the other way round.

Yet the Dolly movement remains an uneasy fit. Consider a crude reading of the work:

1. Hindenburg—Look at the majestic way people talked about big science! That didn’t turn out very well.
2. Bikini—Look at the majestic way people talked about big science! That didn’t turn out very well.
3. Dolly—Look at the majestic way people talked about big science! I wonder if it will turn out well?

I believe what we have here is a case of arson, murder, and jaywalking. Dolly now feels like a quaint late-nineties relic as revolutionary as Deep Blue—that is to say, not at all, in the grand scheme of humanity’s future. Cloning isn’t dragging us to the Singularity anytime soon, and conjuring images of Ray Kurzweil musing about robots replacing us all is a bit of a logical stretch.

Perhaps, as someone too irreligious to get his pants in a twist about the classic Promethean fears of man indulging in acts of creation proper to God, the message of Three Tales is lost on me. Or maybe the point is that the message is lost on everyone else.

Serious aficionados should take a look at this 1957 letter by Salinger explaining why he saw The Catcher in the Rye as unfilmable. Really dedicated junkies of all things Salinger may even go as far as perusing Joyce Maynard’s 1972 article, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life”, which led her to drop out of Yale and live with the author for a year. (I personally find it nigh on unreadable, but it’s evidence that the cliché anxiety about settling down with 2.2 kids has been around for nearly four decades at least.)

And now for something completely different:

• How to Write Badly Well is consistently superb, but Joel Stickley has really outdone himself with this legitimately amazing poem.

• Alex Abboud previewed the new Art Gallery of Alberta, which opened its doors this weekend.

• Juan Cole speculates that Osama bin Laden is probably dead and has ceased to be relevant even if he is alive.

• Ethan Iverson makes the case for extravagant public funding of Wagner’s Ring.

• This weekend’s New York Times Magazine featured a marvelous piece by David Hajdu on AIDS survivor and phenomenal jazz pianist Fred Hersch.

• Those interested in the history of computer games will appreciate this Wired article on how perfectionism killed Duke Nukem Forever, the most infamous piece of vapourware in software history.

Up to this point I have typically refrained from aggregating news and commentary from elsewhere without any reply of my own, but I would rather pass on insightful reading material free of comment than never have it reach you at all. At the very least I hope to introduce some of you to the many excellent blogs and journals I follow.

Some recent highlights:

• Jonathan Crowe of The Map Room has continuing coverage of how geographers have responded to the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

• Brendan Wolfe wrote a comprehensive Wikipedia article about early jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and ran afoul of quality-control standards gone awry. (via Jacket Copy)

• My good friend Melissa Priestley, who recently penned a book about Canadian wine, doesn’t like her bottles corked.

• Jazz drummer Tim Shia to Toronto City Councillors and media: shut up during the performance and learn how to tip. (via Jazzblog.ca)

• Steven Shapin reflects on the Darwin bicentennial celebrations of 2009 in an article eerily reminiscent of a seminar I was in last term.

• At On the Human, Michael Allen Gillespie makes the case for science as an intentional conscious activity like the arts.

• Melanie Bayley, who presented her research at a symposium I attended in October, published a delightful article in New Scientist on mathematical debates in Alice in Wonderland.

• Edmonton Symphony Orchestra director Bill Eddins explains his statement, “In order to understand Beethoven you have to play the piano. And in order to play the piano you have to understand Beethoven.”

I briefly spoke to Robin Wilson, the author of Lewis Carroll in Numberland (reviewed here), from whom I learned that Lewis Carroll once corresponded with Arthur Sullivan to propose an operatic adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Sullivan declined.

Or, as I like to tell it: Sullivan declined, and English comic opera has never recovered since.

In brief: Less a textbook history of twentieth-century classical music than a supreme work of historical criticism, The Rest Is Noise is a persuasive treatise on how tumultuous political landscapes shape artistic production. Ross walks a fine tightrope straddling analytical detail and popular accessibility, but nonetheless conveys a continuous lineage of ideas threading the persistent revolutions and counter-revolutions of twentieth-century composition.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Rest Is Noise, keep reading below.)

Alex Ross, the longstanding music critic of The New Yorker (and not to be confused with Alex Ross, the superhero painter of Marvels and Kingdom Come), is a writer I have been following for some time through his essays and blog. The Rest Is Noise is a natural long-form extension of pretty much what I have come to expect from him—insightful criticism of a lucidity palatable to magazine audiences, driven, as the best criticism in any medium should be, by the writer’s immense repository of comparative examples. Here’s a critic who can spot Bartók’s allusions to Shostakovich and Sibelius’s influence on Bernstein at the minutest level of observation, and understands that a composer’s conscious recognition of his forebears is secondary to the manifestation of connected ideas in their works.

Occasionally, casual listeners accustomed to the deceptively easy semiotics of popular music—those who find meaning in the lyrics more than the music itself—ask me to explain how music can represent anything. It’s a very good question: music is unique among the arts for starting from patterns associated with physical properties and working its way towards representation, whereas the visual arts easily draw on the direct mimesis of reality, and literature borrows from the existing correspondence of language to meaning before it challenges those relationships (if it does at all). In other words, the history of music, as we see it, did not begin with the imitation of birdcalls and rippling brooks. Abstract art came first.

Music therefore has two ways of carrying meaning: the mimesis of real-world aural phenomena—Messiaen’s birdsongs, Mosolov’s iron foundries—and a relationship to structural ideas in the music that has come before, be they the metrical pulsations of regular rhythm or the tonal resonances built on the harmonic series. (One thing I learned from Ross was that the foundational thesis of the latter idea—the correlation of resonance and the cognition of pitch—comes from Hermann von Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music.) So an understanding of how composers draw on or revolt against the soundscape around them, be it classical or popular, is not only useful but essential.

The Rest Is Noise is divided into three parts: 1900-1933, 1933-1945, and 1945-2000. On the surface, this seems front-loaded, especially given how the composers assessed in the opening chapters—Richard Strauss, Mahler, Debussy, Gershwin, and even early Schoenberg—are nowadays uncontroversial. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring may have incited a riot back in the day, but it is hard to conceive of him now as an affront to the Germanic totem of Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner when we are so accustomed to the jarring complexity of his style (whether we know it or not), through film scores in particular. On face, the book’s structure has the appearance of a straw man that capitalizes on, but does not address, the general perception among many musicians and non-musicians alike that twentieth-century music is all method-driven esoterica or, at worst, a noisy morass of absurdism in the key of Cage.

This is thankfully not the case. The book’s chronological organization falls on its centrepiece, the 1933-1945 trilogy of chapters on music in Stalin’s Russia, FDR’s America, and Hitler’s Germany. Appropriate to the function of a keystone, it is also the strongest part of the book. From the outset, Ross’s mission statement is to depict modern music not as a series of self-contained formal innovations, but as the evidence of tremendous geopolitical upheaval:

What the march of history really has to do with music itself is the subject of sharp debate. In the classical field it has long been fashionable to fence music off from society, to declare it a self-sufficient language. In the hyper-political twentieth century, that barrier crumbles time and again: Béla Bartók writes string quartets inspired by the field recordings of Transylvanian folk songs, Shostakovich works on his Leningrad Symphony while German guns are firing on the city, John Adams creates an opera starring Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. Nevertheless, articulating the connection between music and the outer world remains devilishly difficult. Musical meaning is vague, mutable, and, in the end, deeply personal. Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history. My subtitle is meant literally; this is the twentieth century heard through its music.

The argument is only as good as its supporting evidence, and Ross is careful to derive his analysis from the features of the works themselves—a feat rarely accomplished with much success when criticism is astutely conscious of historical context. At every turn, the book is eager to demonstrate that melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas can serve a function of their own. In the case of Dmitri Shostakovich, it was an ambivalent, ironic function of passive resistance to a totalitarian regime that “disappeared” composers who defied the state-sanctioned aesthetic, just nationalistic enough to perturb the American listeners calling on him to defect. For Aaron Copland, it was a folkloric function in tune with the leftist populism of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which ended up putting him in Joseph McCarthy’s line of fire in the anti-communist 1950s before he was adopted, much later, as the soundtrack to the right-wing populism of late-century Republicanism.

As Ross tells it, the debate between popular appeal and the insularity of high art has been going on all century long: we can see the seeds of it in the complicated friendship of Mahler and Strauss. One of the composers we hear about throughout The Rest Is Noise comes from fiction: Adrian Leverkühn from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, who forms a syphilitic pact with the devil in exchange for musical greatness. (“You have to know,” Schoenberg once cried out in a produce market, “I never had syphilis!“) The second half of the twentieth century is in this way continuous with the first: it is absurd to speak of postmodernism, writes Ross, when modernism was itself a plurality of divergent styles rather than a philosophy of singular coherence.

That is not to say it was more of the same—far from it, as we learn from Ross’s whirlwind tour of everything from Iannis Xenakis’s waveform sketches to the computer analysis of Spectralism. But the legacy of the Second World War remains, as the grand tradition of classical music fell from grace on account of its appropriation by (and sometimes, collaboration with) totalitarian ideology. Wagner is so all-encompassing in scope that he “gave impetus to almost every major political and aesthetic movement of the age”—Ross cites examples in liberalism, bohemianism, African-American activism, feminism, and strangely enough, “even Zionism”—but his centrality to Hitler’s brand of fascism is part of a permanent taint on the moral authority of the classical canon, which is overwhelmingly German in origin. In that context, it is easier to understand why composers from 1945 onward sought to rebuild from scratch.

I do not expect that those who have already heard modern music and decided that it is rubbish will change their mind upon reading The Rest Is Noise. Most of the book’s persuasive power rests on its vision of modern classical composition as so diverse an amalgam that surely, a hostile listener’s prejudice hinges on too small a sample. At the very least, it should inspire due consideration of what composers do and why they do it, imploring that we should not dismiss them offhand. Compositional techniques that begin life as formal experimentation eventually sees deployment to meaningful ends. The example from the book that I think of here is Benjamin Britten’s setting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which gave me a whole new perspective on what a Schoenbergian twelve-note row can do.

The Rest Is Noise no doubt invites criticism for venial sins of exclusion, though I find that it only benefits from rejecting the brand of history that “take the form of a teleological tale, a goal-obsessed narrative full of great leaps forward and heroic battles with the philistine bourgeoisie.” But once again, the composers that Ross cites as popular outsiders to the typical narrative of progress that leaps from innovator to innovator—Sibelius, Copland, Orff—strike me as uncontroversial inclusions in the twentieth-century canon, to the degree that such a thing exists. (I was pleased, mind you, to see Ross argue that Bernstein’s West Side Story be considered a serious entry to the operatic tradition on the order of Porgy and Bess despite its Broadway origins.)

If twentieth-century composition stands so far apart from what has come before it, and imports so many ideas from popular forms from folk to jazz to rock (which have fed upon it in return), do we have any grounds to consider the typical stable of modern composers “classical” at all? Where does classical music end?

My solution to the quandary of genre is this: that classical music, like most genres of most media, is not defined so much by shared formal concerns than it is by a continuous thread of intellectual conversation. The likes of John Cage and Pierre Boulez are part of this tradition precisely because they revolted against it. This is where Ross’s commanding ear for musical allusion and cross-reference truly shines: he is able to detect how composers put their educational backgrounds on display, consciously or not, and extrapolate a narrative of aesthetic transformation that weaves in and out of history. The evidence is in the music itself.

On a final note: I would advise against reading The Rest Is Noise too far away from access to a computer, as the online audio companion is absolutely indispensable. Ross writes eloquently about the music he cites, explicating its finer threads of pattern, but that is no substitute for hearing the music yourself. Many will also find the audio glossary helpful, as Ross constantly refers to the musical vocabulary of intervals, scales, and chords, without which he would not be able to make his argument.

As someone musically trained, I wish he did not restrain himself to words alone: nowhere in the book is there a musical staff to be found, and I often wanted to see the notation for myself. Instead, Ross makes do with describing themes and motifs as processions of notes; writing them on a staff would have been more expedient for everyone involved, as those illiterate in musical notation would have to swallow his arguments at face value either way. But Ross is in his own fashion a populist, and I am not.

At precisely the same time, I was reading a ripping good novel by Ian Fleming. (Which one? Stay tuned to the Wednesday Book Club, where it will be featured soon enough.)

Why are they playing Messiaen, I wondered? Oh, of course. It’s the centennial of his birth.

Why are the cover redesigns so splendid on the Penguin paperback reissues of the Fleming novels? Oh, of course. It’s the centennial of his birth.

(I was shaken.)

And what, might I ask, is this piece by Messiaen? The seven books of Catalogue D’Oiseaux.

And who, might I ask, was the namesake of Fleming’s hero James Bond? An ornithologist.

(I was stirred.)

Have I been wrong about God all along? No, Serendipity, but that was a nice try.

Basses imprison her in a ring of fire.