World Famous Comics: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
By: Alex Ross Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 640 Publication Date: October 16, 2007 Release Date: October 16, 2007
Amazon.ca: Anyone who has ever gamely tried and failed to absorb, enjoy, and--especially--understand the complex works of Schoenberg, Mahler, Strauss, or even Philip Glass will allow themselves a wry smile reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross's outstanding The Rest Is Noise. Not only does Ross manage to give historical, biographical, and social context to 20th-century pieces both major and minor, he brings the scores alive in language that's accessible and dramatic. Take Ross's description of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, "in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forming in front of him. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music at the time. It contains fragments of the folk song 'Ach, du lieber Augustin'--the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler. For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating; the crucial line is 'Alles ist hin' (all is lost). The movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone. In them may be discerned traces of the bifurcated scale that begins Salome. But there is no longer a sense of tonalities colliding. Instead, the very concept of a chord is dissolving into a matrix of intervals." Armed with such a detailed aural roadmap, even a troglodyte--or a heavy metal fan--can explore these pivotal works anew. But it's not all crashing cymbals, honking tubas, and somber Germans stroking their chins. Ross also presents the human dramas (affairs, wars, etc.) behind these sweeping compositions while managing, against the odds, to discuss C-major triads, pentatonic scales, and B-flat dominant sevenths without making our eyes glaze over. And he draws a direct link between the Beatles and Sibelius. It's no surprise that the New York Times named The Rest Is Noise one of the 10 Best Books of 2007. Music nerds have found their most articulate valedictorian. --Kim Hughes
Product Description:
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 Stravinsky’s 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 Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s 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 Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches and Louis Menand’s 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.
Left-wing Politics Vitiates Anything Positive in this Book First, I don't consider Mr. Ross's narrative and insights to be particularly compelling. He has a fairly shallow vision of classical music . Second, and more important, his unrelenting liberal political views intrude ubiquitously into his story of 20th century music. His focus on Germany is standard left-wing claptrap. Can't liberals ever give Germans and Nazis a rest. They were bad, really bad and probably lots of Germans still are. But in the 21st century, it's time to move on...which won't occur for people like Mr. Ross who are virtually blind to anything wrong on the left. Also, the book meanders and it's selection of composers to write on is arbitrary---the Sibelius section is inexusable. Finally, he's a socialist and a true believer in big government as big daddy for us all. This book is perhaps the most overrated book in many a year.
TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE Extremely well written but one gets the feeling that two different books have been sandwiched together. The overview of 20th century composers is ideal for anyone looking to consolidate what may only have been fragmented up to then. The analytical sections are addressed to the reader with considerable musical knowledge.The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
The Rest is Noise is an erudite survey of 20th century music by an expert musicologist Alex Ross is the music critic of the New Yorker magazine. This book has been ballyhooed far and wide being named as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the New York Times. The 600 page book takes a detailed look at the great figures of twentieth century music and the major works they produced. The book begins with a riveting account of the 1906 premiere of Richard Strauss' "Salome" which proved shocking to Edwardian audiences. We learn of Strauss' friendship with Gustav Mahler. Their works are discussed in detail. Strauss and Mahler were the last hurrah of traditional tonal music. Gone were the glory days of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and the boys! The new century of two catastrophic wars and the Jewish holocaust would usher in a century of avant gardism and experimentation. Classical music would decline in popularity but would be influential in its impact on jazz, twelve tone compositions, movie music and works using newly invented instruments and electonic/computerized music. The book has technical explanations of the works discussed which I found less interesting than the profiles of the composers and the political and social milieus in which they crafted their art. Such major figures and eras are covered as: Music under dictatorship. We visit Prokofiev and listen to the somber symphonies of Dimitri Shostakovich. We see how Stalin enforced musical banality on an entire generation of Soviet artists. Nazi Germany under Hitler bowed to the altars of Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner while forcing artists like Richard Strauss to bow down to the idol of Hitler. Ross has a chapter on American popular music focusing on African-American jazz manifested in the genius of Duke Elliington and other black composers. We see how radio and the phonograph record revolutionized the way the public heard and responded to music. The chapter on Aaron Copland and music in FDR's America was insightful. Ross has done his homework! We visit artists in exiles from embattled Europe such as Stravinsky with his "Firebird" and "The Rites of Spring" and Arnold Schoenberg the creator of the twelve tone system of musical composition. We explore how immigrant composers found jobs in the Hollywood Studios Aloof artists such as Jean Sibelius are examined. Sibelius disdained much of modernism and charted his own course. We also see the works and career of Benjamin Brittain and Leonard Berstein. Avant garde artists such as Phillip Glass, Martin Gould, John Adams and Steve Reich are discussed by Ross. The author is nonjudgmental in explaining their techniques. As a person who loves classical music but knows little about avant garde music this book proved to be of interest. The book is geared for the general reader who wants to discover how music mirrors life as lived in the past century. Politics, culture and popular public approval have all influenced the paths taken by the muse of music in the modern era. This is a fine boo and is magisterial in the knowledge it conveys to the reader. Excellent!
Not as engaging as it could be There's some good stuff here, and plenty of great material to work with, but somehow it doesn't hang together and engage the reader (at least, this reader) either in the narrative or in the music that the narrative describes. I also missed any real mention of Ralph Vaughan Williams, a personal favorite among the 20th century classical greats--although I tried not to hold that against the author. For me, the real test of a book about music is whether it moves me to listen to the music. Sadly, apart from one Bartok quartet, this one didn't.
BARELY LISTENING Made possible by the exacting editors at The New Yorker, where most of it appeared first, this once-over-very-lightly survey of 20th century Western music begins with the first stirrings of modernity in Bayreuth and Paris circa 1880 and takes us up to now, when new classical work is largely consigned to movie soundtracks.
The real story since 1950 is the discovery of so much forgotten classical past, and the careful efforts to recreate its original sound in recordings. We experience classical music today through the composers brought back to roaring life by musicologists and audio engineers, not the dry postwar modernisms shunned by the public. At home, I now have more beautiful music ready to play than any pre-war musician would have heard in a lifetime. Halfway through the century, the medium itself changed profoundly, from an ephemeral public one to an archival private one. This story Mr. Ross does not tell at all.
What would make his survey really useful is an annotated bibliography for each chapter, showing us where to get the information barely sketched here, along with a discography longer than one page. Ross' survey is very readable; it's just that you're on your own if you want anything more. But I do envy Ross for getting two paychecks for the same work, from his magazine and from his publisher.
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