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

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

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The Rest Is Noise:...

	The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century Alex Ross Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 - 640 pages average customer review:based on 56 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Richly Informative, Engrossing Examination of Twentieth Century Music

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

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The Rest is Noise

I am a longtime admirer of Alex Ross's pieces in The New Yorker. This book is everything I would have expected from him. It is attractively presented and contains an amazing amount of information about twentieth-century music. But it goes further than simply providing information about the music written during the course of the century; it presents Ross's views about the interconnections between the many different styles which are to be found during the last century. Ross's writing is, as always, clear, concise, cogent, perceptive and engaging.

"The BEST Books of 2007"

Was just thinking how great a stocking stuffer this book would be for lovers of classical music. With the holidays fast approaching, I'm starting to compile my shopping list. Books have always been my favorite stocking stuffer. Much better than the mindless toys and trinkets most people give.

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Not all of the rest is noise

This fat book teaches a lot about 20th Century cutting-edge classical music but relatively little about the more popular 20th Century classical music that grew naturally out of the rich strain of classics that existed at the turn of the century in 1900. That's unfortunate, since a major problem for classical musicians now, early ib the 21st Century, is how to make a living in a field that is losing popularity in America and Europe.

For example, Gian Carlo Menotti made good money from his hour-short TV operas like "Amahl and the Night Visitors" and at the same time provided an immense resource of fuel for school and amateur groups to produce those operas and help keep classical music alive. Yet Menotti appears in Ross's book only twice, once in a list of musicians invited to the White House, and once in a list of musicians who were gay or bisexual.

In defense of Ross, the book is already large enough to limit its sale, but his clever title suggests that only the musicians he chose to write about created music-- the rest is just noise. Not so! Someone needs to write a book-- "The Best of the Rest" maybe-- to tell more people how much good listening can be heard from Samuel Barber, Paul Creston, Erno Dohnanyi, Alberto Ginastera, Ferde Grofe, Howard Hanson, Alan Hovhaness, Zoltan Kodaly, John Rutter, William Schuman, Randall Thompson, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, to name just a few.

Nonetheless, Ross has taught me a lot from his high horse. May he gallop on many years more. Professor Howard Tompkins, Retired

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Well written and great background for serious listeners

For someone who has cherished classical music for over fifty years, during which time I and my wife dutifully listened to a lot of cacaphonous and self impressed "contemporary" music, this book provides a wonderful balance of useful background and explanation of what we heard and what the forces were that created it. There is a serous and useful attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff. The writing is clear and occasionally humorous. Even though the author is not himself a musician, he does sometimes go off on fairly technical tangents, but readers like me can skip these.

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