The Rest is Noise

[Dave Monroe]

Ross, Alex.  The Rest Is Noise:
  Listening to the Twentieth Century.
  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

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.

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/05/what_is_this.html

Chapter 1

http://www.fsgbooks.com/fsg/0noise.html

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
Articles, a blog, and a book by the music critic of The New Yorker

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/05/what_is_this.html

http://www.therestisnoise.com/