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The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

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

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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.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #2092 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-10-16
  • Released on: 2007-10-16
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 640 pages

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.ca
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

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker, leads a whirlwind tour from the Viennese premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome in 1906 to minimalist Steve Reich's downtown Manhattan apartment. The wide-ranging historical material is organized in thematic essays grounded in personalities and places, in a disarmingly comprehensive style reminiscent of historian Otto Friedrich. Thus, composers who led dramatic lives—such as Shostakovich's struggles under the Soviet regime—make for gripping reading, but Ross treats each composer with equal gravitas. The real strength of this study, however, lies in his detailed musical analysis, teasing out—in precise but readily accessible language—the notes that link Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story to Arnold Schoenberg's avant-garde compositions or hint at a connection between Sibelius and John Coltrane. Among the many notable passages, a close reading of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes stands out for its masterful blend of artistic and biographical insight. Readers new to classical music will quickly seek out the recordings Ross recommends, especially the works by less prominent composers, and even avid fans will find themselves hearing familiar favorites with new ears. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
The classical music critic for The New Yorker, Alex Ross has a reputation as one of the most perceptive and humorous voices in the industry. Even so, The Rest Is Noiseâ€"a play on Hamlet’s last words, "The rest is silence"â€"is an ambitious undertaking, one that critics unanimously proclaimed a success. Ross’s lively, accessible prose and striking visual images bring the music he describes vividly to life. His anecdotes are amusing, and his revelations are far-reaching and profound. Though he arranges his material in chronological order, his narrative never descends into a clunky, decade-by-decade sequence of events. Instead, Ross gauges the legacy of classical musicâ€"its shaping of jazz, swing, pop, rock, and hip-hopâ€"in this compelling book.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Good Quality, Timely Delivery4
I am happy with the quality of the book I recieved and also the timely manner in which it arrived.

Notes on Tones5
This a wonderful book. It presents a spiky topic with clarity, sincerity and humor. Never once did I get the feeling that the author was a critic writing just for other critics or a historian writing for the ages. I recommend this book to anyone who feels intimidated or baffled by 20th century classical music. It probably won't change your ambivalence toward a lot of this music, but it will give your curiosity a leg up.

True Adventure5
The music of the twentieth century remains an almost undiscovered but volatile treasure. Too often the only classical music people are aware of are works composed in the long bourgeois century - the 1800's - and earlier. But it is only in the twentieth century when music comes face to face with itself in a confrontation that sparks revolution and counter-revolution all at once.

I hope that Alex Ross' book "The Rest Is Noise" can stir many readers into setting out on a true adventure : the discovery of Schoenberg and all of the other major composers of that fractious period. It is a true adventure because listening to this music puts the soul on the chopping block. There are perils here as well as riches that will haunt one.