The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

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 pure beauty or battered them with pure noise, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art.

Alex 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. The end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.

ISBN	0374249393	Pages	624
ISBN13	9780374249397 (What's this?)	Volumes	1
Publisher	Farrar Straus Giroux	Weight (grammes)	903
Imprint	FARRAR STRAUS & GIROUX	Published in	New York
Format	Hardback	Height (mm)	235
Publication date	01 Oct 2007	Width (mm)	161
Library of Congress	2007004504	Spine width (mm)	37
DEWEY	780.904	Academic level	General
DEWEY edition	DC22

Pt. I	1900-1033
1	The Golden Age: Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siecle	3
2	Doctor Faust: Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality	33
3	Dance of the Earth: The Rite, the Folk, le Jazz	74
4	Invisible Men: American Composers from Ives to Ellington	120
5	Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius	157
6	City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties	178
Pt. II	1933-1945
7	The Art of Fear: Music in Stalin's Russia	215
8	Music for All: Music in FDR's America	260
9	Death Fugue: Music in Hitler's Germany	305
Pt. III	1945-2000
10	Zero Hour: The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945-1949	343
11	Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties	355
12	"Grimes! Grimes!": The Passion of Benjamin Britten	411
13	Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties	444
14	Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists	473
15	Sunken Cathedrals: Music at Century's End	512

Be the first to write a customer review

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Listening to the Twentieth Century

Buying options