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| The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | 
 enlarge | Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  54 reviews
Sales Rank: 11074
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 640
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.7
ISBN: 0374249393
Dewey Decimal Number: 780.904
EAN: 9780374249397
ASIN: 0374249393
Publication Date: October 16, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW
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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
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 49 more reviews...
Not Noise But The Sound of the Twentieth Century in Words October 19, 2007
125 out of 134 found this review helpful
This magisterial book will, for many years, remain the definitive account of classical music (or art music, if you prefer) in the twentieth century, from the time of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler to the age of Steve Reich and John Adams. Ross situates his history of an art form within the swirl of contemporary developments in culture and politics. The many individual stories of composers and their chief works are unified through the use of literary themes, the philosophical musings of Theodor Adorno and a close analysis of Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faust. Along the way, Ross gives us an absolutely riveting account of the musical scene in the Third Reich, covering the composers who stayed and were complicit with the regime, as well as those artists who either fled or perished. He covers music in the concentration camps and the life of composers under Soviet dictatorship. He makes links between modern performance practice and the rise of jazz, bebop and adventurous rockers like the Beatles and Radiohead. His knowledge is encyclopedic and his research prodigous. Here and there his enthusiasms betray him. The heavy emphasis on German music as the spine of musical development turns Wagner into the main 19th century ancestor to modern music, a leit motive throughout the book; he scants the incipient modernisms of Tchaikovsky and the Russian School, the contributions of Liszt, Berlioz and other French composers. The chapter on Sibelius is so long it feels like a Bruckner symphony, ditto the scene by scene analysis of Britten's opera Peter Grimes; these sections are among the few longeurs encountered in a historical text that generally reads like a mystery novel. This book is highly recommended for anyone who is afraid of modern music but be warned, it will make you go out and compulsively expand your library of discs!
 A Richly Informative, Engrossing Examination of Twentieth Century Music December 7, 2007
69 out of 74 found this review helpful
Alex Ross has the ability and the resources to write about the music of the 20th Century and to establish himself as the creator of the definitive volume with the publication of THE REST IS NOISE: LISTENING TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. His depth of knowledge is matched only by his ability to communicate with a writing style that places him in the echelon of our finest biographers. This book is indeed a comprehensive study of the music created in the 20th Century, but it is also a survey of all of the arts and social changes, effects of wars, industrialization, and quirks and idiosyncrasies that surfaced in that recently ended period of history: Ross may call this 'listening' to the 20th century, but is also visualizing and feeling the changes of that fascinating period.
Ross opens his survey with a detailed description of the premiere of Richard Strauss' opera SALOME and in doing so he references all of those in attendance (from Mahler to Schoenberg, the last of the great Romantics to the leader of the Modernist innovators) and focuses not only on the chances Strauss took using a libidinous libretto by the infamous Oscar Wilde to the astringent dissonances that surface in this tale of evil and necrophilia. The ballast of that evening is then followed throughout the book, a means of communicating music theory and execution in a manner that is wildly entertaining while simultaneously informative.
Ross studies the influence of nationalism in music (the German School, the French School, the British and the American Schools) and then interweaves the particular innovations by showing how each school and each composer was influenced by the simultaneous destruction and reconstruction of the world borders resulting form the wars of that century. He dwells on the pacifists (Benjamin Britten et al) and those trapped by authoritarian regimes (Shostakovich et al), following the great moments as well as the dissonant chances that found audience at times far from the nidus of origin. Ross crosses the 'pond' showing how American music nurtured in the European schools ultimately found grounding in a sound peculiar to this country (Ives, Copland, etc) and allows enough insight as to the influence of jazz to finally satisfy the most critical of readers.
Ross, then, accompanies us on the journey from melody to atonality and back, all the while giving us insights into the composers that help us understand the changes in music landscape they induced. The book is long and demanding, but at the same time it is one of the finest 'novels on a music theme' ever written. Highly recommended not only to musicologists, ardent music lovers, and students of the arts, but to the reading public who simply loves history enhanced by brilliant prose. Grady Harp, December 07
A feast, a delight, a party October 20, 2007
58 out of 65 found this review helpful
A history of 20th century music with the history left out, thankfully. Ross writes vividly about specific compositions and imparts his enormous enthusiasm. Everyone who dips into this book will compile a list of works to hear. His avidity is a model for other listeners: he approaches Metataseis with the same eager expectation of enjoyment as the Firebird. And happily his enthusiasm is focused solely on the music--the ideologies, manifestoes, movements and politics of 20th century classical music he approaches with extreme scepticism. He is especially good at teasing apart a composer's words from a composer's music. Naturally he has preferences: he provides several full-length portraits of Strauss and Stravinsky at different points in their long careers, and movingly profiles Shostakovich and Britten, but Schoenberg and Cage appear more as instigators than artists, and Boulez is given up as an obnoxious enigma. But overall, I can't imagine a better guide. While modernism in the visual arts has been pretty much embraced by culture at large (e.g. the crowds at MOMA or Tate Modern), musical modernism, the tradition of 20th century classical music, has not. Whatever the explanation, Alex Ross thinks it's a shame that more people don't know it and love it. He certainly loves it, and it's prompted some of the best writing on music since Bernard Shaw.
 Adventures In Bad Music October 31, 2007
40 out of 64 found this review helpful
"The Rest Is Noise" reminded me of another book in my collection: "Symphonies and Their Meaning" Great Works of Music Philip H. Goepp 1st, 2nd & 3rd Series (a book I've kept, because I assumed that it might be valuable due to its gaudy gold-embossed binding, although I see it's available for $3 through Amazon). These and many other books, along with Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" and the long-running radio show "Adventures In Good Music" hosted by the late Karl Haas, and on down to the lectures at your local community college are part of the grand tradition of Music Appreciation studies.
The basic idea of such enterprises is that if you read or listen to someone who is knowledgeable about fine music (as opposed to common music such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Who Threw the Whiskey In the Well?") explain why this music is so prestigious and describe some of the its mechanics, topped off with a declaration of what an immortal genius the composer was, you will somehow "get it," and you will then be a connoisseur of the great masterpieces. Folks, if only you'd study this stuff hard enough, the Holy Ghost or one of the Muses (likely Euterpe) will come down and anoint you, and you'll then be a genuine intellectual. Before reading this book, "Pierrot lunaire" by Schoenberg sounded to you like a subway train coming into a stop combined with feeding time at the zoo, but after reading the tortured prose of Professor Ross it will suddenly be revealed to your now-enlightened ears that it's actually sublime art . . . or "aht."
The only trouble is, "Symphonies and Their Meaning" has examples of the masterpieces in musical notation (so as to be played on the parlour piano), and Bernstein's lectures and the Hass radio series broadcasted performances of the music in question, but Professor Ross only writes about how the piece sounds - e.g., there's a blow-by-blow description of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Why would anyone buy this book to read how the music sounds to Dr. Ross when they can easily hear the same music performed? (for a mere 90 at this site and free elsewhere)
In an effort, I suppose, to vulgarize what is now generally regarded as the music of the chaste, Maestro Ross delights in telling us how naughty this music (not to mention its creators) really is. He seems obsessed with the interval of the diminished fifth - a/k/a, the tritone, a/k/a, the "diabolus in musica." Each time he spots a tritone in the music under consideration, he makes it a point to call our attention to it. This may be titillating to him, but the middle ages have been over for a while now, and this interval occurs in every garden-variety V7 chord. What's the big deal about a tritone if several can be found in "Happy Birthday to You" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame"? And just how does it profit us to learn that one piece has 9 different pitches in a chord and another has 11? Will learning such things really afford us greater enjoyment of the music?
To avoid too depressing a report, I would grant that the book is well-researched and a great piece of scholarship, and there are few passages which evoke a HUH? One is his absurd assertion that "Latin American musicians had originated many of the tricky rhythms that figured in early jazz." Huh? Sooo . . . persons of African descent were unfamiliar with "tricky rhythms"? Is there no rhythm in African music? (We'd better send them some mambo records at once!)
I can imagine that others are as disappointed as I am that many important composers receive scant attention, while every crackpot is treated as a visionary. The book's title is ironic, because Professor Ross chooses to at least mention every serialist, atonalist and microtonalist whose experiments ever emptied a theater, but nothing is said about Ralph Vaughan Williams or Alan Hovhaness. More lines are devoted to the (appallingly influential) rock band The Velvet Underground than to Gustav Holst. A flash-in-the-pan like Brian Eno receives almost a page, but there is no mention of William Walton, Ture Rangstroem or Alberto Ginastera. There are long passages devoted to Stockhausen, but Respighi doesn't exist. Dr. Ross examines such abstruse methods of composition as "stochastic music" and "aleatory music," but apparently he's unfamiliar with modern Neo-Romantic composers such as Marjan Mozetich. For many years now, concert audiences have been voting with their feet against atonal and experimental music, but to Professor Ross, it's the only music that matters (the salient exception being Jan Sibelius, who seems like he's in the wrong book).
Why this should be is not difficult to determine. Young Ross has obviously been spending too much time examining musty artifacts in libraries and breathing the miasma of the academe. Moreover, Manhattan is not a healthy environment for an impressionable young man. What else could cause him to describe a concerto with such purple prose as, "Strings whip up dust clouds around manic dancing feet. Brass play secular chorales, as if seated on the dented steps of a tilting little church. Winds squawk like excited children. Drums bang the drunken lust of young men at the center of the crowd . . . even if some walk away with bruises."
Duuude !?!
A Social History of 20th Century Music November 12, 2007
27 out of 29 found this review helpful
Alex Ross' excellent book is what you might call a 'social' history. He doesn't ignore the analytical side (though following recent practice, there isn't a single bit of notation in the whole book) and gives pretty good prose evocations of how a lot of music was put together--Webern's partition of a twelve tone row into three-note segments, for example--but focuses rather on the whole flow of things, on the relationships between composers and with society. He isn't afraid to quote Webern's sycophantic praise of the Third Reich, for example.
The book is non-ideological in the sense that he steps back and views the infighting and political jockeying for position from outside. It becomes clear that virtually all 20th century music is political or politicized to a considerable degree. Or suffers from politics! The truth Ross isn't afraid to recount is that a lot of 20th century composers, especially among the 'progressives', were playing the avant-garde game of achieving fame through being merely annoying. Many accounts of 20th century music, when they weren't mere chronicles, are either dryly analytical or manifestos for one camp or another (such as Rene Leibowitz' book on Schoenberg and his school).
Ross is particularly keen to rescue certain composers from the condescension of the 'progressives'. Three in particular are Sibelius, Shostakovich and Britten. Boulez comes across as a particularly nasty piece of work on the condescending side. There is a large section on Hitler's musical tastes which is surprisingly relevant because, as Ross points out, it was the Nazis and their love of certain music (and in return the loyalty a remarkable number of composers and conductors showed them, Karajan, for example) that cost 'classical' music its moral authority. He points out that, pre-WWII, classical music was coded in popular culture with higher things. But afterward, we find that every villain loves classical music. The example that springs to mind is Hannibal Lector and the Goldberg Variations.
One interesting point Ross makes is that while there were few religious pieces written by major composers in the 19th century, the 20th century teems with them--everyone from Stravinsky to Messaien to Arvo Part. (He calls works like the Verdi and Berlioz Requiems concert music with Latin text, which is fair enough.)
Ross' book reminds me that we tend to forget how really beautiful a lot of 20th century music is: Messaien, Stravinsky (Symphony of Psalms), Shostakovich, Part, Adams and on and on. I will forgo the near-obligatory list of people he left out or said too much about.
This book is possibly the best history of 20th century music I have read and I have read most of them. It is refreshingly free of adherence to one camp or another and, while idiosyncratic, is enjoyably so. I would say that this would be the book on 20th century music I would most recommend even to a non-musician.
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