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The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | 
 enlarge | Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
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Rating:  56 reviews
Sales Rank: 474
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 704
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 0312427719
Dewey Decimal Number: 780
EAN: 9780312427719
ASIN: 0312427719
Publication Date: October 14, 2008
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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
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 51 more reviews...
A tough mountain to climb November 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'm learning a lot about 20th-century music from The Rest is Noise, but it's a tough read. The book is clearly well researched, however, in an effort to cite sources, the author disrupts the narrative flow. Consider the following sentence:
"Strauss sketched a choral work based on Goethe's text, and, as Jackson discovered, some of that material went into Metamorphosen."
"Jackson" here is Timothy Jackson, a researcher mentioned in an earlier paragraph. Inline citations like this are peppered throughout the book, making it very difficult to focus on the story at hand. I think it would have been better if these citations were in the form of endnotes.
The book takes a detached, scholarly tone throughout. Nonetheless, it is a very informative and thorough review of 20th century classical music, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
 A review of 20th Century music for the tutored and untutored November 23, 2008
I found this book immensely edifying. I have no musical training but have an eclectic interest in music. This book is written in a very readable manner without reducing its scholarly value. I found in it some things I did know and much with which I was unfamiliar. It has led me to listen to music of some 20th century composers with whom I was less familiar or not at all familiar. I would highly recommend this work for all persons, scholared or unscholared, who have an interest in the history, present, and future of the classical music genre.
 don't waste your time November 19, 2008
2 out of 15 found this review helpful
If you have to write a paper on this so-called music, this book might be useful, but other than that the author tries to find meaning when there is nothing there to find. The "music" he writes about is painful to the ears, the book is painful to the eyes.
Superb company as you listen to 20th century art music November 12, 2008
In non-fiction, I look for incisive ideas, readable style, the hooks of interesting storytelling. This book has all that, plus subject matter that is dear to my heart: the ambitions, innovations, and personal histories of great music-makers. Follow along with music discussed in the book and you've got a gesamtkunstwerk of spectacular proportions.
A Fine Summary November 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Writing about music is hard. Over the years, musicians have developed systems of notation for music and yet many musicians have a hard time looking at a sheet of notes and hearing the music. Written words are even more difficult to transform into sound, let alone understanding. We may know what an escape tone is, but we can't always recognize it in listening. All this is by way of saying that even though "The Rest is Noise" is an excellent history of music of the twentieth century, it is no substitute for listening.
The book is primarily about classical music written in the twentieth century. It is organized temporally and then geographically, but the author necessarily jumps around a bit to develop his themes. One of the main themes seems to be the development of atonal music and then the evolution of that music into more current styles. The author will often try to describe a piece talking about its tonality and modulation. Even those trained in music theory may find it difficult to transform the words into an understanding of the nature of the music itself. This is not to suggest that the author is not an interesting writer. His style is sprightly, and surprisingly, for some of the technical discussions, quite interesting. It's no wonder he won a MacArthur award.
The history consists of detailed discussions of the lives of some of the century's great classical composers linked together by stories about lesser composers and general movements, reflecting his original articles on the composers, which appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Although one might quibble that some important figures haven't gotten enough page space, Ross's emphasis seems to be about right, with a few exceptions. One area the author scants is American neo-romantic composers. At the same time the author does not focus on orchestras or audiences, with the result that one would never know from the book that many twentieth century listeners seemed to prefer to listen to more tonal music then that on which the author focuses. Similarly, while the author does occasionally explore what happened in non-classical music before the end of World War II, like the influence of the gamelan or jazz, little of the century's popular music before 1945 is explored.
Ross recognizes that words alone cannot tell the story of twentieth century music and includes a list of thirty recommended recordings. No one should believe that hearing just these recordings will give the listener a full understanding of what happened in classical music in the last century. Instead, I can see that a person wishing to understand the direction of twentieth century music can keep this book at hand, and devote a lifetime to listening to the music that it discusses.
Some critics have complained that the content is too trivial or too difficult. On the other hand, a professor of early music I know, who has little experience with twentieth century music, said this was a fine introduction. I think that's a good summary.
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