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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 780
EAN: 9780312427719
Edition: Reprint
ISBN: 0312427719
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 704
Publication Date: October 14, 2008
Publisher: Picador
Release Date: October 14, 2008
Studio: Picador
Features:
Editorial Review:
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
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.
Average Rating: 
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Often Ross is a very thoughtful commentator of classical and modern music but this book is rubbish. He makes unsubstantiated correlation between German imperialism and German composers and equalizes 12 tone music with totalitarian systems. Instead of illuminating for the reader the different musical periods he unleashes his bias against teutonic music and composers. The only composer who gets a good review is fellow American John Adams, who is praised for taking a stance against the brutal European ... Read More
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I really wanted just one thing from this book -- to be better able to listen to and enjoy music from the 20th century that is more on the dissonant, arrhythmic, "grating" side. I got it, basically. Hooray for Alex Ross.
I tried for a long time to enjoy some of the century's less accessible compositions, and just couldn't get into it. For me, "less accessible" even included many compositions by Béla Bartók, like his string quartets -- let alone the more avant garde composers of later ... Read More
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So, let's see. Modern music began with Strauss' opera "Salome," which premiered in 1906, right? Yes, says Ross in this lengthy, boring, chatty, overwritten, superficial tome. What do you say? Is that your final answer?
Survey sez: BZZZZZT ... Saying that modern music began with Strauss is like saying that modern poetry began with Pound, Yeats, or Eliot. Totally wrong. Modern poetry began with ... wait for it ... Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal," first published in 1857, though many ... Read More
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This book does for modern music what Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New did for modern art - provides both the layperson and the initiate with a perfect primer for a dense and difficult cultural epoch.
Ross tells the story in an engaging style and smartly links the works and their creators to contemporary trends and events. His chapter on Shostakovich is especially gripping, evoking the claustrophobic conditions under which the Soviet composer labored in a critical but compassionate manner. ... Read More
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Alex Ross gives a phenomenal overview of twentieth century music in the 500 some pages in this book. While the single stories about pieces and composers are great on their own, he ties them all together while providing a cohesive sense of trajectory and shape in musical history. Often times twentieth century music can seem very disjointed within individual genres, let alone across all genres, but Ross successfully exposes the underlying line and motion of the century in musical terms, from Strauss and Gershwin ... Read More
