The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | 
| Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  47 reviews
Sales Rank: 1373
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
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Amazon.ca
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 42 more reviews...
 Good Quality, Timely Delivery July 18, 2008
I am happy with the quality of the book I recieved and also the timely manner in which it arrived.
 Notes on Tones July 18, 2008
This a wonderful book. It presents a spiky topic with clarity, sincerity and humor. Never once did I get the feeling that the author was a critic writing just for other critics or a historian writing for the ages. I recommend this book to anyone who feels intimidated or baffled by 20th century classical music. It probably won't change your ambivalence toward a lot of this music, but it will give your curiosity a leg up.
True Adventure July 2, 2008
The music of the twentieth century remains an almost undiscovered but volatile treasure. Too often the only classical music people are aware of are works composed in the long bourgeois century - the 1800's - and earlier. But it is only in the twentieth century when music comes face to face with itself in a confrontation that sparks revolution and counter-revolution all at once.
I hope that Alex Ross' book "The Rest Is Noise" can stir many readers into setting out on a true adventure : the discovery of Schoenberg and all of the other major composers of that fractious period. It is a true adventure because listening to this music puts the soul on the chopping block. There are perils here as well as riches that will haunt one.
It's all about the connections July 2, 2008
Alex Ross' chronicle of Western music in the 20th century is just about as far from most histories of music as can be imagined. In most conventional histories composers and their work break into discrete, hermetically sealed capsules of time and place. One could easily believe that the great composers of Western art music worked in artistic isolation, creating their masterpieces without contact with each other or their surroundings. Of course an occasional friendship or student/teacher relationship might have existed and even been important, but that's about all.
Ross from the outset is determined to shatter walls and establish connections, opening with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss strolling together the night of the premiere of the latter's scandalous opera, Salome, an event at which Schoenberg, Puccini and maybe even Adolf Hitler were present. This sets the tone for the entire book, which sweeps past hitherto familiar events in music history, such as the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, while shining fresh beams of revelation on them. The core of "The Rest is Noise" consists of three chapters that examine music in three nations during particularly shattering periods of upheaval: Stalin's Russia, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal America, and Hitler's Germany. Each centers around a major composer, Shostakovich, Copland and Strauss respectively, examining these artists and the frequently tortuous relationships they had with their contemporary governments and politics in minute detail. I plan to read and re-read these and other chapters, as it is almost impossible to digest all of the information presented at one sitting. It will be easy to do so, since Ross has a knack for finding arresting images and anecdotes that stick in the reader's mind: Schoenberg and Stravinsky knocking about in Beverly Hills, thinking about writing film music; Pierre Boulez railing against his former friend John Cage; and perhaps loopiest of all, the quintessential serialist Milton Babbitt trying his hand at writing a Broadway musical.
It would be beyond the grasp of any author to treat everything he or she examines with equal depth and skill, and not all of Ross's writing is revelatory. His glance at Debussy, for example, produces no new insights, and while I may be prejudiced, I don't think Jan Sibelius merits the loving, detailed chapter he gets, as enthralling as the actual writing may be. Nevertheless, I don't recall another book about music, and I've read many, that brought both music and the people who created it to such vivid, immediate life. This one will stay on a shelf where I can easily reach it for a long time to come.
the rest is a bit overblown June 25, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Famously (well, sort of famously, in small, self-regarding circles), Barnett Newman once claimed that 'our argument [is] with Michaelangelo'. Almost equally famously, Robert Hughes, standing in front of Newman's 'Stations of the Cross' retorted to camera 'Sorry, Barney, you lost'. The attitude was clearly in the air, because Ross quotes John Cage as saying, at around the same time, that 'Beethoven was wrong'. He even uses the phrase as a chapter title, but I can't imagine him following up with Hughes' putdown.
The problem is that, in the end, Ross takes the stuff he writes about too seriously. But, lets face it, 'classical' music, post Schoenberg and Stravinsky, has, for the most part, withered from a world historical, into a niche activity. The most it has aspired to, the most it probably can aspire to, at least when not chasing after the bourgoisie with a chain-saw, is intelligent prettiness, but this is not something that Ross is willing to admit, and without that basic perspective, the whole thing is a bit overblown.
There are good bits: Ross's response to Webern's piano variations is almost word-for-word identical to mine, but even then, on the whole, I find his critical idiom bombastic, esp given the status of the material, and I do think that a general culling of darlings should have been enforced, if necessary, by a friendly editor: sentences like 'In twentieth century music, through all the darkness, guilt, misery, and oblivion, the rain of beauty never ended' do not make my day better.
One curious thing I noted is how so many of the composers who feature are painted in negative terms, as either politically naive (Copland, etc.), nasty (Boulez - Ross does not like Boulez, and who can blame him) or plain evil, Webern. Adrien Leverkuehn is invoked a lot. I wasn't sure what to make of this.
Another curious thing is that there are no transciptions of actual music: Ross does everything with joined up writing. It seems that actual music in a popular book about music is today about as welcome as actual written down equations in a popular book about physics. For some reason, I find this slightly dispiriting.
Finally, I should declare a personal connection to all this stuff: John Cage changed my life. The ultimate cause of my meeting and marrying my wife was a Cage concert (in Saarbrucken, where I lived at the time, which was a very ambitious sort of place: one memorable year, the local opera house - a gift from Adolf Hitler personally - had Wozzeck, Lulu and a magnificent production of Moses and Aaron, all in one season). The Cage concert was memorable fun, but it did did nothing more than confirm Cage's location in the pantheon somewhere below Vivaldi. I don't mean that negatively, but relative to Beethoven? Sorry John, you lost.
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