The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by: Alex Ross
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Amazon.com Review:
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. 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.Take Ross's description of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, "in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forming in front of him. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music at the time. It contains fragments of the folk song 'Ach, du lieber Augustin'--the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler. For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating; the crucial line is 'Alles ist hin' (all is lost). The movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone. In them may be discerned traces of the bifurcated scale that begins Salome. But there is no longer a sense of tonalities colliding. Instead, the very concept of a chord is dissolving into a matrix of intervals." Armed with such a detailed aural roadmap, even a troglodyte--or a heavy metal fan--can explore these pivotal works anew. But it's not all crashing cymbals, honking tubas, and somber Germans stroking their chins. Ross also presents the human dramas (affairs, wars, etc.) behind these sweeping compositions while managing, against the odds, to discuss C-major triads, pentatonic scales, and B-flat dominant sevenths without making our eyes glaze over. And he draws a direct link between the Beatles and Sibelius. It's no surprise that the New York Times named The Rest Is Noise one of the 10 Best Books of 2007. Music nerds have found their most articulate valedictorian. --Kim Hughes
Product Description:
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year
Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007
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. 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.Take Ross's description of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, "in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forming in front of him. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music at the time. It contains fragments of the folk song 'Ach, du lieber Augustin'--the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler. For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating; the crucial line is 'Alles ist hin' (all is lost). The movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone. In them may be discerned traces of the bifurcated scale that begins Salome. But there is no longer a sense of tonalities colliding. Instead, the very concept of a chord is dissolving into a matrix of intervals." Armed with such a detailed aural roadmap, even a troglodyte--or a heavy metal fan--can explore these pivotal works anew. But it's not all crashing cymbals, honking tubas, and somber Germans stroking their chins. Ross also presents the human dramas (affairs, wars, etc.) behind these sweeping compositions while managing, against the odds, to discuss C-major triads, pentatonic scales, and B-flat dominant sevenths without making our eyes glaze over. And he draws a direct link between the Beatles and Sibelius. It's no surprise that the New York Times named The Rest Is Noise one of the 10 Best Books of 2007. Music nerds have found their most articulate valedictorian. --Kim Hughes
Product Description:
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year
Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007
Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007
A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007
In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007
In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: 
- Big and Long Disappointment
I plowed through this book on my Kindle when I first got it. I found it compelling, but ultimately, disappointing. Here are the main reasons why: 1. for the amount of pages and time, I did not really learn a lot new about 20th Century music, and 2. like many long books that take on topics of absurdly ambitious scope, this book rolls out in a very uneven way. The usual failure is to go at it at a normal pace, then break into a gallop as time wears on. This book is really a ton of books. For instance, ... Read More
Rating: 
- Surpassed my High Expectations
This ambitious, thrilling guide to notational music in the twentieth century admirably succeeds in its many goals. Alex Ross is an accomplished music critic at the New Yorker and a recent recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. He also maintains one of the most readable blogs on the internet: http://www.therestisniose.com.
In this his first book, Ross traces the development of music from Strauss's epoch-inaugurating "Salome" through the work of John Adams, considering modernism, jazz, ... Read More
Rating: 
- Dumb, dumb, dumb!
Well, this is a book for people who know nothing about music. It is a simplistic and opinionated quick overview of modern music, but each composer is covered in such a superficial way that it is of no real use.
Rating: - The Rest is Noise, a Companion
Simply put this may be the best survey of 20th Century music I have read.It is lucid, colorful and certainly entertaining.I read Ross in the New Yorker so I was all the more surprised and delighted to find him more expansive and colorful than that which appears in his column.Here he takes time (and space) to introduce and transit one from one section to another, as does Sibelius in my opinion.
Ross disclosed no composer whose name was unfamiliar to me until he got into Ligeti et ... Read More
Rating: - For those who love music and history
Wonderful, deep and not to difficult to read.You will not be able to put it down.Some musical knowledge a plus but it will be interesting for anybody who loves music and history.
- Big and Long DisappointmentI plowed through this book on my Kindle when I first got it. I found it compelling, but ultimately, disappointing. Here are the main reasons why: 1. for the amount of pages and time, I did not really learn a lot new about 20th Century music, and 2. like many long books that take on topics of absurdly ambitious scope, this book rolls out in a very uneven way. The usual failure is to go at it at a normal pace, then break into a gallop as time wears on. This book is really a ton of books. For instance, ... Read More
- Surpassed my High ExpectationsThis ambitious, thrilling guide to notational music in the twentieth century admirably succeeds in its many goals. Alex Ross is an accomplished music critic at the New Yorker and a recent recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. He also maintains one of the most readable blogs on the internet: http://www.therestisniose.com.
In this his first book, Ross traces the development of music from Strauss's epoch-inaugurating "Salome" through the work of John Adams, considering modernism, jazz, ... Read More
- Dumb, dumb, dumb!Well, this is a book for people who know nothing about music. It is a simplistic and opinionated quick overview of modern music, but each composer is covered in such a superficial way that it is of no real use.
- The Rest is Noise, a CompanionSimply put this may be the best survey of 20th Century music I have read.It is lucid, colorful and certainly entertaining.I read Ross in the New Yorker so I was all the more surprised and delighted to find him more expansive and colorful than that which appears in his column.Here he takes time (and space) to introduce and transit one from one section to another, as does Sibelius in my opinion.
Ross disclosed no composer whose name was unfamiliar to me until he got into Ligeti et ... Read More
- For those who love music and historyWonderful, deep and not to difficult to read.You will not be able to put it down.Some musical knowledge a plus but it will be interesting for anybody who loves music and history.
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