Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century » (First Edition)

Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for significant contributions to the field of contemporary music. The Rest is Noise is his first book.

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

The Barnes & Noble Review

Just as living air-conditioned lives has led us to be simultaneously both less aware and more sensitive to the constant invention of the weather, so has our by now complete immersion in a world of recorded sound altered our perception of the power of music. Certainly when it comes to classical composition, our listening is, generally speaking, less rapt and more impatient; the commodifying of opera, symphony, string quartet, and even the most innovative compositional forms into so many CDs has stripped them of their sense of larger destiny as cultural and historical meaning distilled into fleeting moments of experience in the life of the listener. In this rich, stimulating, and thoroughly satisfying book, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross restores that sense of destiny by "listening to the twentieth century," leading us from a 1906 performance of Strauss' Salome (conducted by the composer and attended by Puccini, Mahler, and Schoenberg) to Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. Attuned to the way musical meaning, though "vague, mutable, and, in the end, deeply personal," can underscore and even echo the movements of history, Ross puts his agile intelligence, eclectic ear, and superb critical skills to use in enriching our experience of -- or, better yet, introducing us to -- the works of composers as varied as Stravinsky and Sibelius, Britten and Xenakis. Combining his enviable erudition with a gift for fashioning compelling narrative paths through thorny but exhilarating aesthetic and intellectual terrain, peopled with maverick minds and compelling personalities, Ross has written a fascinating, even exciting book, one that will inform a lifetime's listening. --James Mustich

Preface     xi
1900-1933
The Golden Age: Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siecle     3
Doctor Faust: Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality     33
Dance of the Earth: The Rite, the Folk, le Jazz     74
Invisible Men: American Composers from Ives to Ellington     120
Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius     157
City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties     178
1933-1945
The Art of Fear: Music in Stalin's Russia     215
Music for All: Music in FDR's America     260
Death Fugue: Music in Hitler's Germany     305
1945-2000
Zero Hour: The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945-1949     343
Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties     355
"Grimes! Grimes!": The Passion of Benjamin Britten     411
Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties     444
Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists     473
Sunken Cathedrals: Music at Century's End     512
Epilogue     541
Notes     545
Suggested Listening     595
Acknowledgments     597
Index     601