On 2010-02-05 Robert M. Burns, San Francisco wrote: The subject of the book is simply too vast, too complex, too faceted to write a simple book on 20th century serious (and even popular) music, and come away with a full understanding of the subject. Rather, Mr. Ross, who is without a doubt a very knowledgeable writer and critic, would have been much better served to break his tome up into smaller, more digestible and more complete accountings. It would have been wonderful to have a set of CDs included to hear for myself what he describes in words.
On the other hand, if one wants to see the progress of modern music, starting with Richard Wagner and those giants who followed him, this is the place to start one´s trek through the last 150 years of serious Western music. A good reading requires some minimal understanding of harmony, I believe.
In sum, I would think this book could be a great template for a college level music appreciation course. My particular difficulty was not being able to listen to Ross´s descriptions of various works, many of which I´ve heard and others which I have never had a chance to listen to. I found myself wanting to compare my own views with his. That is why this subject should better be taught in a classroom and not by simply picking up a book on the subject. This book is
. And summed up by saying Better than Good, But Not Great. Currently The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century has an overall rating of 8 over 10.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux claimed 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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