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| The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | 
| Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy New: $19.72
You Save: $10.28 (34%)
New (16) Collectible (2) from $19.72
Avg. Customer Rating:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 7512
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW
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| Customer Reviews:
A Social History of 20th Century Music November 12, 2007
27 out of 29 found this review helpful
Alex Ross' excellent book is what you might call a 'social' history. He doesn't ignore the analytical side (though following recent practice, there isn't a single bit of notation in the whole book) and gives pretty good prose evocations of how a lot of music was put together--Webern's partition of a twelve tone row into three-note segments, for example--but focuses rather on the whole flow of things, on the relationships between composers and with society. He isn't afraid to quote Webern's sycophantic praise of the Third Reich, for example.
The book is non-ideological in the sense that he steps back and views the infighting and political jockeying for position from outside. It becomes clear that virtually all 20th century music is political or politicized to a considerable degree. Or suffers from politics! The truth Ross isn't afraid to recount is that a lot of 20th century composers, especially among the 'progressives', were playing the avant-garde game of achieving fame through being merely annoying. Many accounts of 20th century music, when they weren't mere chronicles, are either dryly analytical or manifestos for one camp or another (such as Rene Leibowitz' book on Schoenberg and his school).
Ross is particularly keen to rescue certain composers from the condescension of the 'progressives'. Three in particular are Sibelius, Shostakovich and Britten. Boulez comes across as a particularly nasty piece of work on the condescending side. There is a large section on Hitler's musical tastes which is surprisingly relevant because, as Ross points out, it was the Nazis and their love of certain music (and in return the loyalty a remarkable number of composers and conductors showed them, Karajan, for example) that cost 'classical' music its moral authority. He points out that, pre-WWII, classical music was coded in popular culture with higher things. But afterward, we find that every villain loves classical music. The example that springs to mind is Hannibal Lector and the Goldberg Variations.
One interesting point Ross makes is that while there were few religious pieces written by major composers in the 19th century, the 20th century teems with them--everyone from Stravinsky to Messaien to Arvo Part. (He calls works like the Verdi and Berlioz Requiems concert music with Latin text, which is fair enough.)
Ross' book reminds me that we tend to forget how really beautiful a lot of 20th century music is: Messaien, Stravinsky (Symphony of Psalms), Shostakovich, Part, Adams and on and on. I will forgo the near-obligatory list of people he left out or said too much about.
This book is possibly the best history of 20th century music I have read and I have read most of them. It is refreshingly free of adherence to one camp or another and, while idiosyncratic, is enjoyably so. I would say that this would be the book on 20th century music I would most recommend even to a non-musician.
 The 20th Century according to Alex Ross November 7, 2007
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
The subtitle of this book is "Listening to the Twentieth", and that what Alex Ross does. The result is a slightly idiosyncratic reading of twentieth century composition -- all the highlights and big names are here, more or less, but Ross is here to tell the story his way. (His longish foray into the tragic life of Sibelius is fascinating, though he's composer who wasn't well served by modernity, and could be characterized as the last 19th century composer, despite dying in 1957.)
Ross loves this music, and it's clear that he lives with the pieces he writes about. He write with affectionate detachment throughout, and doesn't gloss over the moral failings of great artists (Strauss in particular is shown to be tragically bullheaded) He dips lightly into musicology and often meanders into funny, sometimes dishy, anecdotes about these sometimes comically grave characters that made music in the twentieth century. Ross also is willing to let the music speak for itself -- odd to say about a book, I know -- but in this book Ross is very careful about decoupling the music from the pretensions of its creators.
I can't speak for true music people, but if your curious dilletante like me, this book is invaluable.
Classical Music in the 20th Century November 3, 2007
14 out of 17 found this review helpful
As a veteran reviewer in another arena (medicine), I can attest to the fact that is far easier to point out what has been left out of a book than to focus upon what has been selected for inclusion in it.
Yes, Alex Ross has short-changed some composers and some types of music in the 20th century. Unfortunately, some who have reviewed this book here have preferred to dwell upon Alex Ross's slighting of this or that composer or of a sort of electo-something music they favor and have given the book one, two or three stars out of pique.
"The Rest is Noise" is an extraordinary work. It is clearly the most engrossing and insightful account to appear of classical music in the 20th century. It merits five stars.
 Adventures In Bad Music October 31, 2007
39 out of 62 found this review helpful
"The Rest Is Noise" reminded me of another book in my collection: "Symphonies and Their Meaning" Great Works of Music Philip H. Goepp 1st, 2nd & 3rd Series (a book I've kept, because I assumed that it might be valuable due to its gaudy gold-embossed binding, although I see it's available for $3 through Amazon). These and many other books, along with Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" and the long-running radio show "Adventures In Good Music" hosted by the late Karl Haas, and on down to the lectures at your local community college are part of the grand tradition of Music Appreciation studies.
The basic idea of such enterprises is that if you read or listen to someone who is knowledgeable about fine music (as opposed to common music such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Who Threw the Whiskey In the Well?") explain why this music is so prestigious and describe some of the its mechanics, topped off with a declaration of what an immortal genius the composer was, you will somehow "get it," and you will then be a connoisseur of the great masterpieces. Folks, if only you'd study this stuff hard enough, the Holy Ghost or one of the Muses (likely Euterpe) will come down and anoint you, and you'll then be a genuine intellectual. Before reading this book, "Pierrot lunaire" by Schoenberg sounded to you like a subway train coming into a stop combined with feeding time at the zoo, but after reading the tortured prose of Professor Ross it will suddenly be revealed to your now-enlightened ears that it's actually sublime art . . . or "aht."
The only trouble is, "Symphonies and Their Meaning" has examples of the masterpieces in musical notation (so as to be played on the parlour piano), and Bernstein's lectures and the Hass radio series broadcasted performances of the music in question, but Professor Ross only writes about how the piece sounds - e.g., there's a blow-by-blow description of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Why would anyone buy this book to read how the music sounds to Dr. Ross when they can easily hear the same music performed? (for a mere 90 at this site and free elsewhere)
In an effort, I suppose, to vulgarize what is now generally regarded as the music of the chaste, Maestro Ross delights in telling us how naughty this music (not to mention its creators) really is. He seems obsessed with the interval of the diminished fifth - a/k/a, the tritone, a/k/a, the "diabolus in musica." Each time he spots a tritone in the music under consideration, he makes it a point to call our attention to it. This may be titillating to him, but the middle ages have been over for a while now, and this interval occurs in every garden-variety V7 chord. What's the big deal about a tritone if several can be found in "Happy Birthday to You" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame"? And just how does it profit us to learn that one piece has 9 different pitches in a chord and another has 11? Will learning such things really afford us greater enjoyment of the music?
To avoid too depressing a report, I would grant that the book is well-researched and a great piece of scholarship, and there are few passages which evoke a HUH? One is his absurd assertion that "Latin American musicians had originated many of the tricky rhythms that figured in early jazz." Huh? Sooo . . . persons of African descent were unfamiliar with "tricky rhythms"? Is there no rhythm in African music? (We'd better send them some mambo records at once!)
I can imagine that others are as disappointed as I am that many important composers receive scant attention, while every crackpot is treated as a visionary. The book's title is ironic, because Professor Ross chooses to at least mention every serialist, atonalist and microtonalist whose experiments ever emptied a theater, but nothing is said about Ralph Vaughan Williams or Alan Hovhaness. More lines are devoted to the (appallingly influential) rock band The Velvet Underground than to Gustav Holst. A flash-in-the-pan like Brian Eno receives almost a page, but there is no mention of William Walton, Ture Rangström or Alberto Ginastera. There are long passages devoted to Stockhausen, but Respighi doesn't exist. Dr. Ross examines such abstruse methods of composition as "stochastic music" and "aleatory music," but apparently he's unfamiliar with modern Neo-Romantic composers such as Marjan Mozetich. For many years now, concert audiences have been voting with their feet against atonal and experimental music, but to Professor Ross, it's the only music that matters (the salient exception being Jan Sibelius, who seems like he's in the wrong book).
Why this should be is not difficult to determine. Young Ross has obviously been spending too much time examining musty artifacts in libraries and breathing the miasma of the academe. Moreover, Manhattan is not a healthy environment for an impressionable young man. What else could cause him to describe a concerto with such purple prose as, "Strings whip up dust clouds around manic dancing feet. Brass play secular chorales, as if seated on the dented steps of a tilting little church. Winds squawk like excited children. Drums bang the drunken lust of young men at the center of the crowd . . . even if some walk away with bruises."
Duuude !?!
Excellent. October 30, 2007
23 out of 27 found this review helpful
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.
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