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The scandal over modern music has not died down. While paintings by Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, shocking musical works from Stravinskys Rite of Spring onward still send ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, the influence of modern music can be felt everywhere. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalist music has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward. Alex Ross, the brilliant music critic for The New Yorker, shines a bright light on this secret world, and shows how it has pervaded every corner of twentieth century life. 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. Whether they have charmed audiences with the purest beauty or battered them with the purest noise, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art. Ross, in this sweeping and dramatic narrative, takes us from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties, from Hitlers Germany and Stalins Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies. We follow the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. In the tradition of Simon Schamas The Embarrassment of Riches and Louis Menands The Metaphysical Club, the end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.

"All the rest is noise"

Written By: HB/OT

I love Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, even Mahler. But anything beyond that, well, to me it has been just noise. However, Alex Ross's book has helped me to listen in a different way. It takes a long time to work through this book because when Ross talks about this or that composer, this or that piece, I have to stop and find the music (usually at my public library) and listen several times to get what Ross is saying, and then I can listen with more insight (insound?). The historical background is fascinating. The political control in music (e.g., Stalin's effect on Russian composers)is an important part of this book. The subtitle highlights Ross's emphasis on how music tells us something about history. I now understand better the physics of sound and the physical effect that music has on the listener. Ross has a list of recommended recordings which I turn to from time to time. I still do not get Messiaen! This books points the reader in many new directions, opens the reader to other options. It's a great read!

"Lo demás es música"

Written By: Hector Hugo Parra Riffo

Alex Ross ha escrito un libro informativo y ameno.
Para los aficionados a la mºsica, en especial la del siglo XX, es un libro perfecto, que recorre la historia y las claves m¡s importantes de esta expresi³n contempor¡nea.
Adem¡s, el autor tiene una p¡gina en internet donde se puede expandir esta agradable experiencia.

"Not what I was expecting"

Written By: J. Katz

I was expecting a book that would explain more about 20th century [classical] *music*, but instead this book is mainly biography mixed with a bit of history. If you don't already have a strong background in music theory you will be lost; even if you have a strong background in pre-20th century music you will not learn much about 20th century music here. The book was a big disappointment in that respect.

The snippet from the Amazon.com review sums it up: "The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo...[t]he movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone...." If you don't know what "Scherzo", "fourths", or "tritones" are, this book will not explain them to you.

"A tough mountain to climb"

Written By: Crystal Eitle

I'm learning a lot about 20th-century music from The Rest is Noise, but it's a tough read. The book is clearly well researched, however, in an effort to cite sources, the author disrupts the narrative flow. Consider the following sentence:

"Strauss sketched a choral work based on Goethe's text, and, as Jackson discovered, some of that material went into Metamorphosen."

"Jackson" here is Timothy Jackson, a researcher mentioned in an earlier paragraph. Inline citations like this are peppered throughout the book, making it very difficult to focus on the story at hand. I think it would have been better if these citations were in the form of endnotes.

The book takes a detached, scholarly tone throughout. Nonetheless, it is a very informative and thorough review of 20th century classical music, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

"A review of 20th Century music for the tutored and untutored"

Written By: J. A. Beltz

I found this book immensely edifying. I have no musical training but have an eclectic interest in music. This book is written in a very readable manner without reducing its scholarly value. I found in it some things I did know and much with which I was unfamiliar. It has led me to listen to music of some 20th century composers with whom I was less familiar or not at all familiar. I would highly recommend this work for all persons, scholared or unscholared, who have an interest in the history, present, and future of the classical music genre.