The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Alex Ross

Language: English

Pages: 720

ISBN: 0312427719

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year
Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007

Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007
A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007

In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, 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 up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War

My Favourite Album: Best of The Guardian Blog

The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (Special Edition)

The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement: UK & USA, 1979-1993

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beethoven longed to embrace in his “Ode to Joy” showed up in the Hooper ratings—up to ten million for Arturo Toscanini’s broadcasts with the NBC Symphony, and millions more for the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Electrical recording set off a rush to rerecord the classics of the orchestral repertory. Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Orchestra led the way with a disc of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre in July 1925. Toscanini was not far behind, and with the publicity machine of the

He died in 1964 at the hands of three sailors on the isle of Martinique, the victim of a homophobic assault. Roy Harris never duplicated the triumph of his Third Symphony, despite many noble attempts. Virgil Thomson was much in demand, but mainly as a critic; there were few professional stagings of his Gertrude Stein operas, Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All, and the Metropolitan Opera declined to produce his final effort, Lord Byron. Paul Bowles essentially stopped writing music

the middle: the first half belongs to C-sharp major, the second half to G major. This is an unsettling opening, for several reasons. First, the notes C-sharp and G are separated by the interval known as the tritone, one half-step narrower than the perfect fifth. (Leonard Bernstein’s “Maria” opens with a tritone resolving to a fifth.) This interval has long caused uneasy vibrations in human ears; scholars called it diabolus in musica, the musical devil. In the Salome scale, not just two notes but

premiere, Ellington set down initial ideas for his own opera, which was to have been called Boola, and which would presumably have shown how Negro opera should really be done. The title character was imagined as a mythic being who would sum up the entire African-American experience, from his crossing to America on a slave ship, to his experiences as a soldier in the Civil War, to his emancipation and emigration north, and on to his arrival in the renaissance city of Harlem—where, Ellington once

to Sibelius’s American reputation was Olin Downes, who from 1924 to 1955 served as music critic of the New York Times. The son of Louise Corson Downes, a crusading feminist and Prohibitionist, Downes believed that classical music should appeal not just to elites but to common people, and from the bully pulpit of the Times he loudly condemned the obscurantism of modern music—in particular, the artificiality, capriciousness, and snobbery that he perceived in the music of Stravinsky. Sibelius was

Download sample

Download

About admin