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Listening to the Twentieth Century
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2007
On Sale: October 16, 2007
640 pages
ISBN: 0374249393
EAN: 9780374249397
Kindle: B000UZQIDI
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
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.
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