content, amazing. physical book, not so much...

books:


	• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century Alex Ross Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 - 640 pages average customer review:based on 42 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Pedantic Mister Alex Ross

I've decided to give this book four stars for a number of reasons, including its highly informative content, its ability to transform and inspire the reader to become a musicologist in the model of the author, and its ability to make obscure, avant-garde pieces of music actually stand out with true color. Despite these positive assessments, I wish to briefly underline why I'm not giving this book five stars. For one, Alex Ross, the author, comes across as a rather pedantic, elitist individual: not only does he fail to translate any quotes given in French, Spanish, Italian, etc. (thus losing the efficacy and relevancy of the quote and his point) but he also uses a language which automatically assumes that all of his readers have advanced through the same music theory training as him. Personally, the more than frequent moments in the book where Mr Ross expounds a piece of music by discussing its structure in terms of glissandos, ostinatos, and major sevenths means very little to me - and I even tried learning about these separate articles via Wikipedia and other supplementary websites to no avail. It really requires a special university level course to understand the relevancy of these topics as Mr Ross discusses them. In short, he has written a book for the high-brow, high-profile crowd which normally reads the New Yorker, the publication which he has served at for over 12 years now.

It's not a horrible book. I just wish I would have known that I should've purchased The Complete Idiot's Guide to Music Theory before reading it!

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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

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content, amazing. physical book, not so much...

i/m on page 260, by which time i/ve learned quite a lot i didn/t know abt some music (which is odd), and have ordered or downloaded quite a few cds. my only complaint is that the binding of the book has now broken *twice*. i haven/t been carrying it around or dropping it or anything, it just *breaks*. if you don/t need the info, wait for the paperback. no one else even *wants* to read your superglued copy of a book.

content - 5. book - as low as it goes.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

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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