Letters

BOOKS Atlantic Yards is the largest project Frank Gehry, now seventy-eight, has ever undertaken. And if it proves to be his last large project, it will be a fitting capstone to a career utterly blind to the public function of architecture. For how better to assert your dedication to personal expression over context than to have your distinct visual style serve as the emblem for the death of two Brooklyn neighborhoods? Jacobs's legacy, on the other hand, is assured. Her influence continues to be present both where she is heeded and where she is ignored. I even know of one Manhattan bar where you can order a "Jane Jacobs" (Prosecco, elderflower liqueur, orange bitters, Hendrick's gin). I know of no establishment where you can order a "Frank Gehry." Certainly not in Brooklyn. • CHARLES TAYLOR is a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger and a contributor to the New York Times, the New York Observer, the Nation, and other publications. SINUMINED The Rest Is Noise Editors: Barry Gewen's review of Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise (Winter 2008) contains a factual error that illustrates the flaw in his argument. He describes the Beatles song "Norwegian Wood" as having a "pentatonic melody"—a melody restricted to five notes—which he says gives it a "skeletal quality." But the song's uncanniness comes from its use of an eccentric scale called the mixolydian. The mixolydian scale is exactly like the major scale— the do-re-mi scale from The Sound of Music—except that the seventh note—ti—is lowered by a half-step. After its E mixolydian opening, "Norwegian Wood" modulates abruptly into the key of E minor, adding yet an eighth note to its melodic palette. Gewen emphasizes the pentatonic scale because he equates tonality with simplicity. But as the surprising sophistication of "Norwegian Wood" demonstrates, that's a dangerous mistake to make. And while Gewen is right that African music frequently uses the pentatonic scale, it just as frequently has a rhythmic complexity that's daunting to even the best-trained Western musicians. The twentieth-century's classical music was not all one atonal shriek. Its best composers and its best songwriters were largely mining the same vein. Alex Ross knows this, which is why he devotes whole chapters of his book to tonal composers like Sibelius, Copland, and Britten. Portraying Ross as a champion of atonality is as gross a distortion as portraying the Beatles as naïve rubes. Lennon and McCartney, like Shostakovich and Britten, were tonal composers constantly testing themselves against the limits of their inherited forms. LARRY HARDESTY Somerville, Mass. Barry Gewen Replies Larry Hardesty is correct about "Norwegian Wood," and I apologize for the error. But I believe my general argument still holds. Hardesty's analysis either parallels or is derived from Wilfrid Mellers's analysis of "Norwegian Wood" in his 1973 book, The Music of the Beatles: Twilight of the Gods. Mellers too noted that the song is in the mixolydian mode (hardly an "eccentric scale"). But he also offered many examples of Beatles songs that are Pentatonic either in whole or in part—"She Loves You," "I Saw Her Standing There," "I Wanna Be Your Man," "I'm Happy to Dance with You," "Things We Said Today," "Help," "Michelle," "When I'm Sixty-Four," "A Day in the Life," and . . . but why go on? As Mellers observes, "the nature of the tunes (both of folk soloists and of rock groups) is conditioned by their origins. . .. The melodies tend to be pentatonic, or at most modally heptatonic." As for Hardesty's other points, I wasn't aware that I portrayed Ross as a "champion of atonality" but of modern music that grows out of the crisis of the European classical tradition. (If anything, I find Ross too eclectic.) And when Hardesty says I equate tonality with simplicity , I confess I don't recognize either myself or my argument . The B-minor Mass simple? Don Giovanni? My point, rather, was that tonality, both diatonic and pentatonic, grounds us in a universal humanity in a way that music written from within the modern classical tradition does not. CORRECTION: On page 73...