The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by Alex Ross
Book Summary Information
Author: Alex RossEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-14
ISBN: 0312427719
Number of pages: 704
Publisher: Picador
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780312427719
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Book Review: Modernity as beginning of the end
Summary: 4 Stars
Everybody who knows a little bit about 20th century classical music must realize how ambitious not to say insane the idea sounds to sum up the entire century in one single book. It has almost to be called a miracle to which extend Alex Ross mastered this tremendous task. And even more how elegant he guides the reader through this terrifying vast and in its variety almost incomprehensible field. This trip that cannot be anything else than a tour de force turns out as surprisingly enjoyable and entertaining.
Of course, he read many wise books and had probably a lot of good advisers. But even if many subjects could only be touched cursorily, you can tell that Ross knows what he is talking about and that he is much more than a brilliant compiler of foreign wisdom.
Another merit of this book is that, even if Ross cannot completely hide his own preferences, he really tries hard to approach every composer and every school with a fair attempt to understand their inner artistic motives as far as he can. This alone is a glorious exception and achievement in music esthetic literature.
The general perspective that Ross takes provides many highly interesting and revealing views on esthetic developments that emerge from distant view much more clearly as they did before. You can observe that even opposite esthetic positions in the end mirror both at the same time a certain atmosphere in society of a time.
This book was recently published in a German edition and received a rather mixed echo. This has its reasons and points to some limits of this book. Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus plays a role of a Leitmotiv in Ross' book to which he comes back repeatedly. And this for a good reason since this novel about a fictional contemporary composer reflects a great deal of the esthetic discussions of the time. However, what Ross is not realizing in all its consequences in his interpretation of the novel and at the same in his own book, is to which extend the esthetic and political crisis of the 20th century is a culmination or destination of European history since the Renaissance. A naive reader of Ross' book could think that the 20th century music is just a strange and crazy tour de mode. In truth there is a long untold story before the story.
In his letters Thomas Mann points out that he sees his hero Adrian Leverk?hn not as a genius but as somebody who, like one of his main models the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, carries the fate of his times which means that he is just fulfilling a destiny. But what does this mean?
That the history of culture like all history is a story of rise and decline. The prime of the arts and philosophy in Europe became so hypertrophic and overripe by the end of the 19. century that it could only burst into tears. The interesting thing about this process is that this explosion was a delirious spectacle where hundreds years of history interfered to strange colourful pictures and that its protagonists jumped from the cliff in the believe of entering into a new era. What they like Leverk?hn thought was a liberating and accelerating stimulans, metaphoric as the pact with the devil in form of the syphilis, was a self destroying poison.
Summary of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
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.
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.
?
Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for significant contributions to the field of contemporary music.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
A Pulitzer Prize FinalistOne of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
A Washington Post Best Book of the YearA Time Magazine Best Book of the Year
An Economist Book of the Year
A Fortune Magazine Top Book of the Year
A Fortune Magazine Top Book of the Year
A Newsweek Favorite Book of the Year
A New York Magazine Top 10 Book of the Year
A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year
A Slate Best Book of the Year
A Slate Best Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Deems Taylor Award
Winner of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Deems Taylor Award
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Winner of?The Guardian First Book Prize
?
The Rest Is Noise shows the origin and enduring influence of modern sound on twentieth century life. 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 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.?He follows 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 a history of the twentieth century through its music.
"The Rest Is Noise is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music . . . With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, The Rest Is Noise is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement . . . a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand 'more seeingly' in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly."-Geoff Dyer, The New York Times
"The Rest Is Noise is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music . . . With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, The Rest Is Noise is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement . . . a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand 'more seeingly' in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly."-Geoff Dyer, The New York Times
"In Ross's book, by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music, history winds through the pages like those highway signs and mountains. We linger over some; others whiz by. For a dozen years or so Ross has been the catholic-minded critic for The New Yorker, writing about new music without a chip on his shoulder or a tone of condescension and not as a defensive apologist for a supposedly embattled culture-but instead fluently, as if taking for granted that new music were on its own terms every bit as relevant and vital as contemporary art or literature. His prose is notable in a discipline that frets too much about its obsolescence . . . When he writes his way, Ross leads you to imagine you really are, to borrow his subtitle, listening to the twentieth century."-Michael Kimmelman, The New York Review of Books
"What powers this amazingly ambitious book and endows it with authority are the author's expansive curiosity and refined openness of mind."-Jamie James, Los Angeles Times
"An impressive, invigorating achievement . . . This is the best general study of a complex history too often claimed by academic specialists on the one hand and candid populists on the other. Ross plows his own broad furrow, beholden to neither side, drawing on both."-Stephen Walsh, The Washington Post
"Readers love The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by New Yorker critic Alex Ross. It was that most rare literary beast-both a lively read and an authoritative overview of a complex topic. In its sweep Ross' book offered a bird's-eye view of a massive arc of time and space that ranged from Imperial Vienna and Mahler's monumental symphonies to Silicon Valley and John Adams' 'Nixon in China.'"-Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times
"It would be hard to imagine a better guide to the maelstrom of recent music than Mr. Ross, who worked on this book for a decade. He has an almost uncanny gift for putting music into words. No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording."-The Economist
"In Ross's book, by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music, history winds through the pages like those highway signs and mountains. We linger over some; others whiz by. For a dozen years or so Ross has been the catholic-minded critic for The New Yorker, writing about new music without a chip on his shoulder or a tone of condescension and not as a defensive apologist for a supposedly embattled culture-but instead fluently, as if taking for granted that new music were on its own terms every bit as relevant and vital as contemporary art or literature. His prose is notable in a discipline that frets too much about its obsolescence . . . When he writes his way, Ross leads you to imagine you really are, to borrow his subtitle, listening to the twentieth century."-Michael Kimmelman, The New York Review of Books
"What powers this amazingly ambitious book and endows it with authority are the author's expansive curiosity and refined openness of mind."-Jamie James, Los Angeles Times
"An impressive, invigorating achievement . . . This is the best general study of a complex history too often claimed by academic specialists on the one hand and candid populists on the other. Ross plows his own broad furrow, beholden to neither side, drawing on both."-Stephen Walsh, The Washington Post
"Readers love The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by New Yorker critic Alex Ross. It was that most rare literary beast-both a lively read and an authoritative overview of a complex topic. In its sweep Ross' book offered a bird's-eye view of a massive arc of time and space that ranged from Imperial Vienna and Mahler's monumental symphonies to Silicon Valley and John Adams' 'Nixon in China.'"-Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times
"It would be hard to imagine a better guide to the maelstrom of recent music than Mr. Ross, who worked on this book for a decade. He has an almost uncanny gift for putting music into words. No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording."-The Economist
"Ross is a supremely gifted writer who brings together the political and technological richness of the world inside the magic circle of the concert hall, so that each illuminates the other."-Lev Grossman, Time
"[Ross] states that his subtitle is meant literally: 'this is the twentieth century heard through its music.' He informs the reader that the book is the result of fifteen years of work as a music critic. He also occasionally reiterates the purpose of the book as the text unfolds, as, for example,?then he writes that the book illuminates 'the
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
"[Ross] states that his subtitle is meant literally: 'this is the twentieth century heard through its music.' He informs the reader that the book is the result of fifteen years of work as a music critic. He also occasionally reiterates the purpose of the book as the text unfolds, as, for example,?then he writes that the book illuminates 'the
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
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