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.
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
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century Accessories
 Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
The Savage Detectives: A Novel
Then We Came to the End: A Novel
Out Stealing Horses: A Novel
Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Olivier Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time
Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century Reviews
This books points the reader in many new directions, opens the reader to other options. The subtitle highlights Ross's emphasis on how music tells us something about history. I now understand better the physics of sound and the physical effect that music has on the listener. It takes a long time to work through this book because when Ross talks about this or that composer, this or that piece, I have to stop and find the music (usually at my public library) and listen several times to get what Ross is saying, and then I can listen with more insight (insound). The political control in music (e.g., Stalin's effect on Russian composers)is an important part of this book.
The historical background is fascinating. I still do not get Messiaen. It's a great read. I love Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, even Mahler. But anything beyond that, well, to me it has been just noise. Ross has a list of recommended recordings which I turn to from time to time.
However, Alex Ross's book has helped me to listen in a different way.
Para los aficionados a la música, en especial la del siglo XX, es un libro perfecto, que recorre la historia y las claves más importantes de esta expresión contemporánea. Alex Ross ha escrito un libro informativo y ameno. Además, el autor tiene una página en internet donde se puede expandir esta agradable experiencia.
I was expecting a book that would explain more about 20th century [classical] *music*, but instead this book is mainly biography mixed with a bit of history. The book was a big disappointment in that respect. If you don't already have a strong background in music theory you will be lost; even if you have a strong background in pre-20th century music you will not learn much about 20th century music here. The snippet from the Amazon.com review sums it up: "The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo.[t]he movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone." If you don't know what "Scherzo", "fourths", or "tritones" are, this book will not explain them to you.
The book takes a detached, scholarly tone throughout. I'm learning a lot about 20th-century music from The Rest is Noise, but it's a tough read. I think it would have been better if these citations were in the form of endnotes. Nonetheless, it is a very informative and thorough review of 20th century classical music, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. "Strauss sketched a choral work based on Goethe's text, and, as Jackson discovered, some of that material went into Metamorphosen.".
The book is clearly well researched, however, in an effort to cite sources, the author disrupts the narrative flow. Inline citations like this are peppered throughout the book, making it very difficult to focus on the story at hand. Consider the following sentence:. "Jackson" here is Timothy Jackson, a researcher mentioned in an earlier paragraph.
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 have no musical training but have an eclectic interest in music. I found this book immensely edifying. This book is written in a very readable manner without reducing its scholarly value. 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.
|
