The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

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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Book Summary Information

Author: Alex Ross
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-14
ISBN: 0312427719
Number of pages: 704
Publisher: Picador

Book Reviews of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Book Review: The Rest is Noise, a Companion
Summary: 4 Stars

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 al. My mind is open but alas my ears are not.

I am not a musician so I cannot comment on his detailed musical analysis of the various pieces in which he explored technical matters; I simply skipped those. I read all else to my great pleasure. He never fails to add to my knowledge and therefor enjoyment of music I listen to.

Highly recommended with one caveat: He gives to short shrift to most 20th century British composers of the pre and immediate post WWII era. Britten may be all fine and good for some, I am not one of those. Ross' virtually passing over RVW is shocking and more than annoying to me.

Still, it is his book. I feel I can comment on what he offers us. I don't feel I can criticize that which he doesn't offer.

My nose grows longer: He passed Elgar as though he never lived. I am not fond of him but he is not to be ignored.

Summary of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

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.
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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

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