The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by: Alex Ross
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
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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:

The scandal over modern music has not died down. While paintings by Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, shocking musical works from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring onward still send ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, the influence of modern music can be felt everywhere. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalist music has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward. Alex Ross, the brilliant music critic for The New Yorker, shines a bright light on this secret world, and shows how it has pervaded every corner of twentieth century life.
The Rest Is Noise takes the reader inside the labyrinth of modern sound. It tells of maverick personalities who have resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with the purest beauty or battered them with the purest noise, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art.
Ross, in this sweeping and dramatic narrative, takes us 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. We follow the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. In the tradition of Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches and Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, the end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.


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Customer Reviews
Average Rating: out of 5 stars
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - The essential one volume guide to 20th Century Music
There are already plenty of excellent reviews (and some that weren't), so I will just say that this is a really good introduction to 20th C. music; I've given gift copies to my friend Jim, a professional composer, and my friend Alec, on the occasion of his graduation from the sixth grade.A book that can plausibly reach an audience this broad is doing something very, very good and not easily achieved.You will no doubt enjoy it immensely.

Now, Mr. Ross, you need to give us a list ... Read More
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - A Fascinating and Exhilirating Read for Lovers of Modern Music
Alex Ross has produced a remarkable history of music in the Twentieth Century from from the last days of Mahler and Strauss up to John Adams in the 21st Century. The book is packed with a wealth of very well researched biographical, historical, and musical information surrounding the the many musical geniuses the Twentieth Century produced. While some composers are given more words than others, Ross takes great care not to overlook any important movements and leaders, even though they are as vastly ... Read More
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Interesting if not too insightful !
I am conducting a series of lectures on the historical approach to music by composers and thought this might be just the book to recommend to my class.However, I found the book too far advanced - musically - for the novice and not that insightful for the educated musical listener.It was interesting reading and I will use some of his information to enlighten my lectures.In general, however ...it should be recommended for a reader with some limited knowledge of music who would like to ... Read More
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars - 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, the ... Read More
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - 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, neo ... Read More
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