The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
By Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
448 pages
$27.95
#5. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishers
640 pages
$30.00
A history of a violent, chaotic, transformative century told through its
bizarre and challenging classical music. Ross is a supremely gifted
writer who brings the political and technological richness of the world
inside the magic circle of the concert hall, so that each illuminates the
other. He has the critic's gift of allowing you to hear music the way he
does; he writes about the works of daunting titans like Strauss and
Schoenberg, Messiaen and Reich and Cage, in a way that makes them
accessible, but without sacrificing his intellectual ambition or the
technical precision of his critical language.