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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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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 780
EAN: 9780312427719
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
Sales Rank: 2145
Studio: Picador



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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.
 


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



Customer Reviews
Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - All the rest is noise
I love Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, even Mahler. But anything beyond that, well, to me it has been just ... Read More


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Lo demás es música
Alex Ross ha escrito un libro informativo y ameno.
Para los aficionados a la música, en especial ... Read More


Rating: 2 out of 5 stars - Not what I was expecting
I was expecting a book that would explain more about 20th century [classical] *music*, but instead this ... Read More


Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - A tough mountain to climb
I'm learning a lot about 20th-century music from The Rest is Noise, but it's a tough read. The book is ... Read More


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - A review of 20th Century music for the tutored and untutored
I found this book immensely edifying. I have no musical training but have an eclectic interest in music. ... Read More

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Copyright ©2003, Mark Carey.