The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

This book addresses a long-standing desire to familiarize myself with 20th Century "classical" music. I really enjoyed it and found it a very educational resource for my musical exploration. I know the term "classical" is incorrect - call it concert music, music in the European tradition of composed music, art music, WHATEVER! For better or for worse using the term "classical" allows most people to know what you're talking about. For that reason I will use that term in the rest of the review. In a TV interview and in the preface to the book the author commented that he listened exclusively to classical music until college. In college he would play some things to his fellow students, who would comment that it sounded like Sonic Youth or Cecil Taylor, etc. Although I have been starting to immerse myself in the music for some time now, I am still very much a novice and this book's release is perfectly timed for me. I am not totally ignorant of older forms of classical music, but I approached 20th Century art music not via Bach and Beethoven, but via Frank Zappa and Ornette Coleman. Frank Zappa, who became my musical idol in my teens (and remains so in my 40's), was particularly influential in exposing me to a new world of possibilities. He made direct reference to Stravinsky, Varese and Holst, among others, in his music. Likewise in modern jazz there has been a lot of cross-polination with this music. A jazz fan would find the harmonies in Erik Satie's piano works not at all unfamiliar. I suspect that many music fans are also approaching this music in a similar way, and this book will be very helpful. This is not an academic book and it is not aimed at an ivory tower readership. It does not assume an encyclopedic knowledge of all music that's gone before, although it does use musical terminology, so if you're not very familiar with such terms (like I am not, really), you'll want to consult a dictionary or encyclopedia occasionally. A bit of a challenge is hardly a bad thing, I think. Mr. Ross uses very evocative language to describe the key works of music in his book. This is never an easy task. Music hits you in places that words will never go! Still, he does a very good job. When I was reading this I had never heard most of the music being described, but reading about it I certainly wanted to! Music does not exist in a vacuum, but is both a product of and an influence on its times. Mr. Ross writes a very compelling narrative which puts the music in the context of the places, times, politics, and the lives of the people involved. This is a fascinating history book as well as a book on music. It's also full of colorful and entertaining character studies of these composers' often "unusual" personalities. Their interactions with each other are not necessarily always all that high-minded! This music has survived in relative obscurity since the early part of the 20 Century. Mr. Ross proposes a number of explanations for

Much ink has been spilled about modern classical music and the intellectual hurdles that it presents to audiences accustomed to the tunes of the 1800s. While Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso's creations of abstract grotesquery have snaked their way into the mainstream arts culture, Arnold Schoenberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen's masterpieces still belong to that mysterious realm of works that continue to baffle modern audiences with their unconventional takes on composition. The subject of modern music is no novelty to the shelves of any distinguished bookstore; but the majority of books published on it are often shrouded in the language of academia, often confounding its readers even more than the obtuse sounds penned by its composers. In contrast to many of its predecessors, Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; $30.00) brilliantly disseminates the code of modern music by seamlessly coalescing the history of the 20th century with the great composers who propelled this musical evolution. With his mastery of the languages of music and prose, Ross offers a read that is accessible and thought provoking. Alex Ross, classical music critic of the New Yorker, has always astounded me with his extraordinarily engaging and highly intelligent music critiques. The Rest is Noise, a seven-year work that culminated in this recent release, is perhaps his finest work to date. Ross' book reads like a novel, with composers like Strauss, Shostakovich, and Copland and political figures like Hitler, Stalin, and Kennedy as characters in the history of modern music. Its narration is a tour de force that sweeps the reader through the 20th century, taking us from genres as diverse as opera, chamber music, and symphonies to jazz, bebop, and tin-pan alley. The first chapter begins with the music of the early 1900's, a bygone epoch during which Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss reigned as the kings of musical Vienna. These titans had just released two controversial works--Strauss' Biblical sexpot, Salome and Mahler's First Symphony--to a musical audience besotted with the Classical and Romantic traditions. In an age when the world was still recovering from the quasi-atonality of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Mahler and Strauss' more striking musical innovations proved groundbreaking in paving the way for the century's esoteric musical language. Ross takes us to the war-and-politics-smitten world of Mahler, Strauss, Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Ravel, Sibelius, Janacek, Schoenberg, Krener, Korngold, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Bartok, Berg, Weill, and Webern, all of whom were subjected to the socio-political environment of pre-50's Europe and America. This era is highlighted by the pieces that each of these masters composed during times of war, oppression, liberation, politicking, and racism. The reader sees the world through the eyes of the Jewish Schoenberg composing atonal pieces in a Germany that swore death to Judentum; the patriotic Janacek and Ba

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

The book is great. GREAT!!! As a classical musician, I really appreciate the time and effort Mr. Ross puts into writing and discussing the state of music today. There are MANY great stories and a ton of great information in "The Rest is Noise", and I look forward now to reading it a second time. I learned a great deal about some my favorite composers, as well as composers I did not know very much about. It's been several years since I took my music history classes at college, and this was a great refresher and an eye-opener in many respects. Thank you for the wonderful book!! Highly recommended.

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.