Listen to This »

ALEX ROSS has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Alex Ross’s award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing.

Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

Ross's essays themselves embrace almost every aspect of music, and for this he deserves all honor. In particular, he cogently argues that we need to ignore the artificial boundaries between contemporary pop and classical, that we should pay attention to ambitious music no matter what its source or how it's marketed. As a result, Listen to This includes pieces on concert hall oldies but goodies such as Mozart, Schubert and Brahms but also on contemporary pop gods like Bob Dylan, Bjork and Radiohead.

Preface

Where to Listen

Part I

1 Listen to This: Crossing the Border from Classical to Pop 3

2 Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues: Bass Lines of Music History 22

3 Infernal Machines: How Recordings Changed Music 55

Part II

4 The Storm of Style: Mozart's Golden Mean 71

5 Orbiting: Radiohead's Grand Tour 85

6 The Anti-Maestro: Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Los Angeles Philharmonic 102

7 Great Soul: Searching for Schubert 124

8 Emotional Landscapes: Bjork's Saga 138

9 Symphony of Millions: Classical Music in China 159

10 Song of The Earth: The Arctic Sound of John Luther Adams 176

11 Verdi's Grip: Opera as Popular Art 188

12 Almost Famous: On the Road with the St. Lawrence Quartet 204

13 Edges of Pop: Kiki and Herb, Cecil Taylor and Sonic Youth, Sinatra, Kurt Cobain 212

14 Learning The Score: The Crisis in Music Education 226

15 Voice of the Century: Marian Anderson 239

16 The Music Mountain: Inside the Marlboro Retreat 246

Part III

17 I Saw The Light: Following Bob Dylan 267

18 Fervor: Remembering Lorraine Hunt Lieberson 288

19 Blessed Are The Sad: Late Brahms 293

Notes 315

Suggested Listening 335

Acknowledgments 347

Index 349