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The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Alex Ross Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published) Published: 2008-10-14 ISBN: 0312427719 Number of pages: 704 Publisher: Picador Product features:
Book Reviews of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth CenturyBook Review: Music as cultural history Summary: 5 StarsRoss's book is essentially a musico-cultural history of the Western 20th century (he leads off with Strauss's Salome, and carries it all the way through to the latest sounds coming out of New York, France, Germany, etc. in 2000). A cultural history because he situates the music in its contexts, be it pre-first world war Vienna, Weimar Germany, Britain after Elgar, the US in the 1930s and succeeding decades, and so forth. His descriptions of the difficulties faced by some German composers under Naziism, or composers like Shostakovich and Prokoviev under Stalinism, are heart-rending.What is even more extraordinary is that when you read him describing the kinds of music no one would call toe-tapping or singable (the Second Viennese School, or composers like Milton Babbitt and George Crumb in post-war America, you really wish you had a disk and a player to hear these works that you might otherwise have ignored.
Precisely because of these social and cultural contexts, Ross's work is a long way from the kind of old fashioned musical history which contents itself simply with the influence of composer A on composer B and C, and so forth, as if they all lived in vacuums. He has his likes and dislikes (Boulez and Stockhausen don't seem to be among his favorites), but he measure their work and their importance with great fairness.
There is one rather extraordinary (I thought) omission and that is any attempt to measure the musical culture and productivity of Italy, He may well believe that the country disappeared into the background after, say, Puccini was gone; but it would have been interesting to know why that was the case (and one can't just blame it on Fascism, given the musical productivity of far worse regimes, like Nazi Germay and the Communist Soviet Union).
Summary of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth CenturyWinner 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. ?
Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for significant contributions to the field of contemporary music. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award A Pulitzer Prize FinalistOne of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year A Washington Post Best Book of the YearA Time Magazine Best Book of the Year An Economist Book of the Year A Fortune Magazine Top Book of the Year A Newsweek Favorite Book of the Year A New York Magazine Top 10 Book of the Year A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year A Slate Best Book of the Year A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction Winner of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Deems Taylor Award A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Winner of?The Guardian First Book Prize ? The Rest Is Noise shows the origin and enduring influence of modern sound on twentieth century life. 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 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.?He follows 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 a history of the twentieth century through its music. "The Rest Is Noise is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music . . . With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, The Rest Is Noise is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement . . . a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand 'more seeingly' in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly."-Geoff Dyer, The New York Times "The Rest Is Noise is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music . . . With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, The Rest Is Noise is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement . . . a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand 'more seeingly' in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly."-Geoff Dyer, The New York Times
"In Ross's book, by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music, history winds through the pages like those highway signs and mountains. We linger over some; others whiz by. For a dozen years or so Ross has been the catholic-minded critic for The New Yorker, writing about new music without a chip on his shoulder or a tone of condescension and not as a defensive apologist for a supposedly embattled culture-but instead fluently, as if taking for granted that new music were on its own terms every bit as relevant and vital as contemporary art or literature. His prose is notable in a discipline that frets too much about its obsolescence . . . When he writes his way, Ross leads you to imagine you really are, to borrow his subtitle, listening to the twentieth century."-Michael Kimmelman, The New York Review of Books
"What powers this amazingly ambitious book and endows it with authority are the author's expansive curiosity and refined openness of mind."-Jamie James, Los Angeles Times
"An impressive, invigorating achievement . . . This is the best general study of a complex history too often claimed by academic specialists on the one hand and candid populists on the other. Ross plows his own broad furrow, beholden to neither side, drawing on both."-Stephen Walsh, The Washington Post
"Readers love The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by New Yorker critic Alex Ross. It was that most rare literary beast-both a lively read and an authoritative overview of a complex topic. In its sweep Ross' book offered a bird's-eye view of a massive arc of time and space that ranged from Imperial Vienna and Mahler's monumental symphonies to Silicon Valley and John Adams' 'Nixon in China.'"-Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times
"It would be hard to imagine a better guide to the maelstrom of recent music than Mr. Ross, who worked on this book for a decade. He has an almost uncanny gift for putting music into words. No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording."-The Economist "Ross is a supremely gifted writer who brings together the political and technological richness of the world inside the magic circle of the concert hall, so that each illuminates the other."- Lev Grossman, Time
"[Ross] states that his subtitle is meant literally: 'this is the twentieth century heard through its music.' He informs the reader that the book is the result of fifteen years of work as a music critic. He also occasionally reiterates the purpose of the book as the text unfolds, as, for example,?then he writes that the book illuminates 'the
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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