The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2008.A sweeping musical history that goes from the salons of pre-war Vienna to Velvet Underground shows in the sixties.In ‘The Rest is Noise’, Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, gives us a riveting tour of the wild landscape of twentieth-century classical music: portraits of individuals, cultures, and nations reveal the predicament of the composer in a noisy, chaotic century. Taking as his starting point a production of Richard Strauss's Salome, conducted by the composer on 16 May 1906 with Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg and Adolf Hitler seated in the stalls, Ross... Next