Customer Reviews

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

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This magisterial book will, for many years, remain the definitive account of classical music (or art music, if you prefer) in the twentieth century, from the time of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler to the age of Steve Reich and John Adams. Ross situates his history of an art form within the swirl of contemporary developments in culture and politics. The many individual stories of composers and their chief works are unified through the use of literary themes, the philosophical musings of Theodor Adorno and a close analysis of Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faust. Along the way, Ross gives us an absolutely riveting account of the musical scene in the Third Reich, covering the composers who stayed and were complicit with the regime, as well as those artists who either fled or perished. He covers music in the concentration camps and the life of composers under Soviet dictatorship. He makes links between modern performance practice and the rise of jazz, bebop and adventurous rockers like the Beatles and Radiohead. His knowledge is encyclopedic and his research prodigous. Here and there his enthusiasms betray him. The heavy emphasis on German music as the spine of musical development turns Wagner into the main 19th century ancestor to modern music, a leit motive throughout the book; he scants the incipient modernisms of Tchaikovsky and the Russian School, the contributions of Liszt, Berlioz and other French composers. The chapter on Sibelius is so long it feels like a Bruckner symphony, ditto the scene by scene analysis of Britten's opera Peter Grimes; these sections are among the few longeurs encountered in a historical text that generally reads like a mystery novel. This book is highly recommended for anyone who is afraid of modern music but be warned, it will make you go out and compulsively expand your library of discs!

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

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.

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.

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 Bartok exploring the possibilities of combining folk tunes and ethnic speech modes into their operas and orchestral works; the African-American Duke Ellington reforming jazz during a time when blacks were banned from the white temples of music; and the fiscally cunning Strauss penning operas and tone poems in an environment where collaboration with Jewish musicians could mean death in the Third Reich.

The author winds the clock forward to the decades of Stravinsky, Britten, Varese, Boulez, Messiaen, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Gorecki, and Shostakovich, all of whom caught their audiences at the edge of their seats with unconventional, non-conformist compositions. The reader is treated to extensive analyses of Stravinsky's shocking ballets and orchestral suites, Britten's ventures into operas hinting at homosexual themes, Shostakovich's schizophrenic pieces seesawing between Soviet genius and political slavery, and Messiaen's oddly transfiguring liturgical works. Never before have the musical languages of the avant-garde and the modernist been so lucidly translated, and in here we develop an understanding of the psychological impetus that drove these composers into challenging their audiences with an art form opposite to the musical dialogues of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach.

Included also is a spatter of writings on American composers who forged the distinct musical voice of the New World. Copland the populist, Barber the American Schubert, Ives the modernist, and Cage the Yankee avant-garde are a few of the composers who played seminal roles in shifting the pendulum of musical America from the Old World to the New. Of interest to the admirers of independent music is the section on the minimalist composers Philip Glass, John Adams, and Steve Reich. This triumvirate of composers played huge roles in influencing the work of musicians like Sigur Ros, Björk, the Beatles, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, the Talking Heads, and Sufjan Stevens, each of whose work is brushed on lightly with Ross' incorporation of insight from the century's musical heritage.

As a fitting close to his book, Ross surveys the condition of classical music in the present century. The author stipulates that today's classical composers have achieved the once-impossible task of impregnating their theories into the vernacular language of pop. Music is in a state of flux, and the face of classical composition has metamorphosed from exclusively white to multiracial; from exclusively male to one that includes females; and from sounds deriving purely from classical instruments to those that stem from the most unimaginable sources. Foreign composers like Tan Dun, Unsuk Chin, Toru Takemitsu, Osvaldo Golijov, and Sofia Gubaidulina and even pop geniuses like Björk and Radiohead all play integral roles in transforming the landscape of classical music. This epiphany may come as strange to those who have been cultured to believing that great classical music stopped with the death of Tchaikovsky, but cultural and gender diversity have recently played integral roles in shaping the way we listen to the world.

In the end, Ross' book addresses a subject that is relevant even outside the musical sphere. You don't have to be a lover of classical music to thoroughly enjoy the wealth of insights that the author has to offer. And if you do, this book can easily inspire you to listen to the pieces Ross so vividly describes in this fascinating chronicle of cultural and musical history. Even now, as I listen to the closing pages of Berg's 3 Pieces for Orchestra, I look back to those pages Ross so generously wrote about the composer's personality and his genius. My understanding of Berg has never been clearer.

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 this, which the reader may or may not agree with, but one recurring theme is that the various movements in 20th Century music eventually seem to paint themselves in corners through an almost fanatical insistence on taking things to the most abstract and extreme (if the audience likes it, it's a failure!). Not everyone comes out in favorable light. Pierre Boulez, in particular, comes across a bit absurd in his extreme positions. Whether this is an accurate portrayal I don't know. Clearly the author's personal tastes come through here, but he does a good job of describing their mindset.

The first section of the book deals with the events of the early 20th Century - the decline of the decadent old empires, the rapidly-growing role of industry and technology, and others, which led people to search for something new. One recurring theme is the struggle between the aspirations for "pure" art versus a desire to be relevant to society at large. The chapter dealing with Russian composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich's struggles and compromises during the height of Stalin's reign of terror is a highlight. It covers, from a different angle, the some of the subjects dealt in "the Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn.

Sandwiched between the chapters on Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany is the chapter on music in the USA in that period. He does not insinuate that they are equivalent, by any means. He does detail how even in the US composers had to navigate through dealings with government bureaucracy and corporate sponsors, for both of whom artistry was perhaps not the top priority.

I could nitpick whether Sibelius and Britten deserve entire chapters while others get little more than name-dropping mention (The chapter on Sibelius is very good). Consequently his coverage of the second half of the century is more condensed. I wish that he might have spent more time on it.

At the end of the book is a recommended discography of 10 recordings, then another 20 more. I have ordered a number of these and look forward to going back and looking at Mr. Ross's descriptions after actually listening to them. I will leave it to better-informed people to argue whether or not these really are the "best" versions of the pieces, but they seem as good a place as any to start. Certainly it would seem reasonable to me to start your collection of Stravinsky with a performance conducted by the man himself. Coming from a background in performer-oriented rock and jazz, it can be daunting to figure out which performance of a composer's work is best, so this discography helps such readers get at least a start.

I give this book a five-star rating without reservations. Mr. Ross is to be commended for his work. The same unfortunately cannot be said for his publisher who physically put together the book. I did not consider it fair to the author to deduct points, but I would like to give a big raspberry to the publisher, FSG. I bought the book new, and by the time I was barely halfway through, the binding started breaking apart. This to me is a shameless disregard for quality, which is sadly pervasive these days. Several other reviewers on this and other websites have mentioned the same problem. I plan to hang on to this book and use it as a reference when exploring new music. I wish I didn't have to rubber cement it back together so soon!

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.

I plowed through this book on my Kindle when I first got it. I found it compelling, but ultimately, disappointing. Here are the main reasons why: 1. for the amount of pages and time, I did not really learn a lot new about 20th Century music, and 2. like many long books that take on topics of absurdly ambitious scope, this book rolls out in a very uneven way. The usual failure is to go at it at a normal pace, then break into a gallop as time wears on. This book is really a ton of books. For instance, the whole section on soviet composers deserves a book of its own, but since it doesn't get one, it gets a kind of sorry, desultory treatment that we learn almost nothing new from.

Everyone is going to come to a book like this wanting to see their heroes achieve greater glory than they have hitherto been granted. I plead guilty to this on so many counts. Ironically, though, even the ones who do achieve greater reverence, were disappointing. For instance, Sibelius. Like so many great artists, Sibelius is known through but a few works. His masterpieces are his dark, more probing works, like Symphonies 3, 4 and 6. His first symphony is one of the great debut symphonies of all time. None of these works are considered. In fact, the author is satisfied to engage Sibelius only as a kind of conceptual puppet: representing a kind of strange symbol of the counterrevolution.

Another case, for me are the Russians. Stravinsky is a giant. We all know that. We have all heard the story of the premiere of Rite. But what about all the other fascinating stuff? Like Rimsky-Korsakov's wife saying 'you still have Glazunov' to him at her husband's funeral (S said it was the most painful thing anyone ever said to him). Stravinsky's quixotic relationship with Tchaikovsky, and things like the fascinating Le Baiser de la Fee, where he completed an unfinished Tchaikovsky work. But then, there is nothing really about the many rebirths Stravinsky experienced: my favorite being his popping out and feeling the influence of other greats. For instance, the symphonies from the 40s, where he openly quotes Bartok, represents a fascinating cycle of influence and evolution. But it also would have given this book more soul: as it is, it reads like a student showing off his collection of pinned insects. THE most important thing about music is the degree to which it evolves as a language together.

Also, there is Prokofiev. I was sorely disappointed that there was no real coverage of his work. What about The Fiery Angel? His 7 symphonies are actually great. 2, 3, and 6 are raging masterpieces. (Recently, Valery Gergiev has been touring the US playing the whole cycle [great man!] trying to convince people of this, finally!) And as another reviewer notes: where is ballet, for god's sake? Prokofiev produced so many great ballets, many of them completely unknown.

Even obvious things, like Bartok trekking Eastern Europe and Varese being part of the NYC scene of the 40s, are not here. (Nevermind more fascinating things like Bartok's having to sum up his career, while simultaneously doing a mise en scene of the just ended war, deconstructing Shostakovich's 7th, all on his deathbed..)

Was hoping even Pehr Nordgren would make it into this book, but no. I end with this because it shows that perhaps my delusions are the problem here, but this is, whatever others may be seeing here, not a convincing treatment of the insanely ambitious mission. Calling it definitive just smacks me as bizarre: it's a swath, a cross-section, and some of it is interesting, but it's mostly a long string of missed opportunities.

Writing about music is hard. Over the years, musicians have developed systems of notation for music and yet many musicians have a hard time looking at a sheet of notes and hearing the music. Written words are even more difficult to transform into sound, let alone understanding. We may know what an escape tone is, but we can't always recognize it in listening. All this is by way of saying that even though "The Rest is Noise" is an excellent history of music of the twentieth century, it is no substitute for listening.

The book is primarily about classical music written in the twentieth century. It is organized temporally and then geographically, but the author necessarily jumps around a bit to develop his themes. One of the main themes seems to be the development of atonal music and then the evolution of that music into more current styles. The author will often try to describe a piece talking about its tonality and modulation. Even those trained in music theory may find it difficult to transform the words into an understanding of the nature of the music itself. This is not to suggest that the author is not an interesting writer. His style is sprightly, and surprisingly, for some of the technical discussions, quite interesting. It's no wonder he won a MacArthur award.

The history consists of detailed discussions of the lives of some of the century's great classical composers linked together by stories about lesser composers and general movements, reflecting his original articles on the composers, which appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Although one might quibble that some important figures haven't gotten enough page space, Ross's emphasis seems to be about right, with a few exceptions. One area the author scants is American neo-romantic composers. At the same time the author does not focus on orchestras or audiences, with the result that one would never know from the book that many twentieth century listeners seemed to prefer to listen to more tonal music then that on which the author focuses. Similarly, while the author does occasionally explore what happened in non-classical music before the end of World War II, like the influence of the gamelan or jazz, little of the century's popular music before 1945 is explored.

Ross recognizes that words alone cannot tell the story of twentieth century music and includes a list of thirty recommended recordings. No one should believe that hearing just these recordings will give the listener a full understanding of what happened in classical music in the last century. Instead, I can see that a person wishing to understand the direction of twentieth century music can keep this book at hand, and devote a lifetime to listening to the music that it discusses.

Some critics have complained that the content is too trivial or too difficult. On the other hand, a professor of early music I know, who has little experience with twentieth century music, said this was a fine introduction. I think that's a good summary.

The rest is noise by A. Ross is a superb book. It is truly exciting and makes me want to listen to modern music which I ordinarily don't like. Understanding how composers came to write the way they did makes it alive and understable. I am reading at bedtime and have trouble puting the book down. What amazes me is that even though I cannot follow all the technical aspects ( I have played an instrument and know some music but not much theory), it still captures me.