Alex Ross' chronicle of Western music in the 20th century is just about as far from most histories of music as can be imagined. In most conventional histories composers and their work break into discrete, hermetically sealed capsules of time and place. One could easily believe that the great composers of Western art music worked in artistic isolation, creating their masterpieces without contact with each other or their surroundings. Of course an occasional friendship or student/teacher relationship might have existed and even been important, but that's about all.

Ross from the outset is determined to shatter walls and establish connections, opening with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss strolling together the night of the premiere of the latter's scandalous opera, Salome, an event at which Schoenberg, Puccini and maybe even Adolf Hitler were present. This sets the tone for the entire book, which sweeps past hitherto familiar events in music history, such as the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, while shining fresh beams of revelation on them. The core of "The Rest is Noise" consists of three chapters that examine music in three nations during particularly shattering periods of upheaval: Stalin's Russia, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal America, and Hitler's Germany. Each centers around a major composer, Shostakovich, Copland and Strauss respectively, examining these artists and the frequently tortuous relationships they had with their contemporary governments and politics in minute detail. I plan to read and re-read these and other chapters, as it is almost impossible to digest all of the information presented at one sitting. It will be easy to do so, since Ross has a knack for finding arresting images and anecdotes that stick in the reader's mind: Schoenberg and Stravinsky knocking about in Beverly Hills, thinking about writing film music; Pierre Boulez railing against his former friend John Cage; and perhaps loopiest of all, the quintessential serialist Milton Babbitt trying his hand at writing a Broadway musical.

It would be beyond the grasp of any author to treat everything he or she examines with equal depth and skill, and not all of Ross's writing is revelatory. His glance at Debussy, for example, produces no new insights, and while I may be prejudiced, I don't think Jan Sibelius merits the loving, detailed chapter he gets, as enthralling as the actual writing may be. Nevertheless, I don't recall another book about music, and I've read many, that brought both music and the people who created it to such vivid, immediate life. This one will stay on a shelf where I can easily reach it for a long time to come.

The music of the twentieth century remains an almost undiscovered but volatile treasure. Too often the only classical music people are aware of are works composed in the long bourgeois century - the 1800's - and earlier. But it is only in the twentieth century when music comes face to face with itself in a confrontation that sparks revolution and counter-revolution all at once.

I hope that Alex Ross' book "The Rest Is Noise" can stir many readers into setting out on a true adventure : the discovery of Schoenberg and all of the other major composers of that fractious period. It is a true adventure because listening to this music puts the soul on the chopping block. There are perils here as well as riches that will haunt one.

Famously (well, sort of famously, in small, self-regarding circles), Barnett Newman once claimed that 'our argument [is] with Michaelangelo'. Almost equally famously, Robert Hughes, standing in front of Newman's 'Stations of the Cross' retorted to camera 'Sorry, Barney, you lost'. The attitude was clearly in the air, because Ross quotes John Cage as saying, at around the same time, that 'Beethoven was wrong'. He even uses the phrase as a chapter title, but I can't imagine him following up with Hughes' putdown.

The problem is that, in the end, Ross takes the stuff he writes about too seriously. But, lets face it, 'classical' music, post Schoenberg and Stravinsky, has, for the most part, withered from a world historical, into a niche activity. The most it has aspired to, the most it probably can aspire to, at least when not chasing after the bourgoisie with a chain-saw, is intelligent prettiness, but this is not something that Ross is willing to admit, and without that basic perspective, the whole thing is a bit overblown.

There are good bits: Ross's response to Webern's piano variations is almost word-for-word identical to mine, but even then, on the whole, I find his critical idiom bombastic, esp given the status of the material, and I do think that a general culling of darlings should have been enforced, if necessary, by a friendly editor: sentences like 'In twentieth century music, through all the darkness, guilt, misery, and oblivion, the rain of beauty never ended' do not make my day better.

One curious thing I noted is how so many of the composers who feature are painted in negative terms, as either politically naive (Copland, etc.), nasty (Boulez - Ross does not like Boulez, and who can blame him) or plain evil, Webern. Adrien Leverkühn is invoked a lot. I wasn't sure what to make of this.

Another curious thing is that there are no transciptions of actual music: Ross does everything with joined up writing. It seems that actual music in a popular book about music is today about as welcome as actual written down equations in a popular book about physics. For some reason, I find this slightly dispiriting.

Finally, I should declare a personal connection to all this stuff: John Cage changed my life. The ultimate cause of my meeting and marrying my wife was a Cage concert (in Saarbrucken, where I lived at the time, which was a very ambitious sort of place: one memorable year, the local opera house - a gift from Adolf Hitler personally - had Wozzeck, Lulu and a magnificent production of Moses and Aaron, all in one season). The Cage concert was memorable fun, but it did did nothing more than confirm Cage's location in the pantheon somewhere below Vivaldi. I don't mean that negatively, but relative to Beethoven? Sorry John, you lost.

What ever happened to composers who were/are women in the 20th century? Like the reviewer with whom I agree that Ralph Vaughan Williams music is sorely underated, so I believe the music of women is also. What about those brave ladies who, without much encouragement did it anyway? That includes Cecile Chaminade, Lili Boulanger, Libby Larsen, Miriam Gideon, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Thea Musgrave, Alma Mahler, Margaret Bonds, Louise Viardot, Amy Beach (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach), and scores of others whose names are not represented? I do feel this book has much good information, but am able to give it only three stars, due to the omissions.

I started reading the hardcover version, then decided to get the audio version. While the actual content seems quite engaging, the volume of the MP3 files is way too low. Upping the volume on my mp3 player introduces so much background hiss it's distracting (and I need not push the volume up for other content I listen, be it speech or music).

Very disappointing.

i/m on page 260, by which time i/ve learned quite a lot i didn/t know abt some music (which is odd), and have ordered or downloaded quite a few cds. my only complaint is that the binding of the book has now broken *twice*. i haven/t been carrying it around or dropping it or anything, it just *breaks*. if you don/t need the info, wait for the paperback. no one else even *wants* to read your superglued copy of a book.

content - 5. book - as low as it goes.

I've decided to give this book four stars for a number of reasons, including its highly informative content, its ability to transform and inspire the reader to become a musicologist in the model of the author, and its ability to make obscure, avant-garde pieces of music actually stand out with true color. Despite these positive assessments, I wish to briefly underline why I'm not giving this book five stars. For one, Alex Ross, the author, comes across as a rather pedantic, elitist individual: not only does he fail to translate any quotes given in French, Spanish, Italian, etc. (thus losing the efficacy and relevancy of the quote and his point) but he also uses a language which automatically assumes that all of his readers have advanced through the same music theory training as him. Personally, the more than frequent moments in the book where Mr Ross expounds a piece of music by discussing its structure in terms of glissandos, ostinatos, and major sevenths means very little to me - and I even tried learning about these separate articles via Wikipedia and other supplementary websites to no avail. It really requires a special university level course to understand the relevancy of these topics as Mr Ross discusses them. In short, he has written a book for the high-brow, high-profile crowd which normally reads the New Yorker, the publication which he has served at for over 12 years now.

It's not a horrible book. I just wish I would have known that I should've purchased The Complete Idiot's Guide to Music Theory before reading it!

First, I don't consider Mr. Ross's narrative and insights to be particularly compelling. He has a fairly shallow vision of classical music . Second, and more important, his unrelenting liberal political views intrude ubiquitously into his story of 20th century music. His focus on Germany is standard left-wing claptrap. Can't liberals ever give Germans and Nazis a rest. They were bad, really bad and probably lots of Germans still are. But in the 21st century, it's time to move on...which won't occur for people like Mr. Ross who are virtually blind to anything wrong on the left. Also, the book meanders and it's selection of composers to write on is arbitrary---the Sibelius section is inexusable. Finally, he's a socialist and a true believer in big government as big daddy for us all. This book is perhaps the most overrated book in many a year.

Extremely well written but one gets the feeling that two different books have been sandwiched together. The overview of 20th century composers is ideal for anyone looking to consolidate what may only have been fragmented up to then. The analytical sections are addressed to the reader with considerable musical knowledge.The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Alex Ross is the music critic of the New Yorker magazine. This book has been ballyhooed far and wide being named as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the New York Times. The 600 page book takes a detailed look at the great figures of twentieth century music and the major works they produced.
The book begins with a riveting account of the 1906 premiere of Richard Strauss' "Salome" which proved shocking to Edwardian audiences. We learn of Strauss' friendship with Gustav Mahler. Their works are discussed in detail. Strauss and Mahler were the last hurrah of traditional tonal music. Gone were the glory days of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and the boys! The new century of two catastrophic wars and the Jewish holocaust would usher in a century of avant gardism and experimentation. Classical music would decline in popularity but would be influential in its impact on jazz, twelve tone compositions, movie music and works using newly invented instruments and electonic/computerized music.
The book has technical explanations of the works discussed which I found less interesting than the profiles of the composers and the political and social milieus in which they crafted their art. Such major figures and eras are covered as:
Music under dictatorship. We visit Prokofiev and listen to the somber symphonies of Dimitri Shostakovich. We see how Stalin enforced musical banality on an entire generation of Soviet artists.
Nazi Germany under Hitler bowed to the altars of Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner while forcing artists like Richard Strauss to bow down to the idol of Hitler.
Ross has a chapter on American popular music focusing on African-American jazz manifested in the genius of Duke Elliington and other black composers. We see how radio and the phonograph record revolutionized the way the public heard and responded to music. The chapter on Aaron Copland and music in FDR's America was insightful. Ross has done his homework!
We visit artists in exiles from embattled Europe such as Stravinsky with his "Firebird" and "The Rites of Spring" and Arnold Schoenberg the creator of the twelve tone system of musical composition. We explore how immigrant composers found jobs in the Hollywood Studios
Aloof artists such as Jean Sibelius are examined. Sibelius disdained much of modernism and charted his own course. We also see the works and career of Benjamin Brittain and Leonard Berstein.
Avant garde artists such as Phillip Glass, Martin Gould, John Adams and Steve Reich are discussed by Ross. The author is nonjudgmental in explaining their techniques.
As a person who loves classical music but knows little about avant garde music this book proved to be of interest. The book is geared for the general reader who wants to discover how music mirrors life as lived in the past century. Politics, culture and popular public approval have all influenced the paths taken by the muse of music in the modern era. This is a fine boo and is magisterial in the knowledge it conveys to the reader. Excellent!

There's some good stuff here, and plenty of great material to work with, but somehow it doesn't hang together and engage the reader (at least, this reader) either in the narrative or in the music that the narrative describes. I also missed any real mention of Ralph Vaughan Williams, a personal favorite among the 20th century classical greats--although I tried not to hold that against the author. For me, the real test of a book about music is whether it moves me to listen to the music. Sadly, apart from one Bartok quartet, this one didn't.

Made possible by the exacting editors at The New Yorker, where most of it appeared first, this once-over-very-lightly survey of 20th century Western music begins with the first stirrings of modernity in Bayreuth and Paris circa 1880 and takes us up to now, when new classical work is largely consigned to movie soundtracks.

The real story since 1950 is the discovery of so much forgotten classical past, and the careful efforts to recreate its original sound in recordings. We experience classical music today through the composers brought back to roaring life by musicologists and audio engineers, not the dry postwar modernisms shunned by the public. At home, I now have more beautiful music ready to play than any pre-war musician would have heard in a lifetime. Halfway through the century, the medium itself changed profoundly, from an ephemeral public one to an archival private one. This story Mr. Ross does not tell at all.

What would make his survey really useful is an annotated bibliography for each chapter, showing us where to get the information barely sketched here, along with a discography longer than one page. Ross' survey is very readable; it's just that you're on your own if you want anything more. But I do envy Ross for getting two paychecks for the same work, from his magazine and from his publisher.

Made possible by the exacting editors at The New Yorker, where most of it appeared first, this once-over-very-lightly survey of 20th century Western music actually begins with the first stirrings of modernity in Bayreuth and Paris circa 1880 and takes us up to today, long after classical music as a new creative form has been consigned to movie soundtracks.

The real story since 1950 is the discovery of so much forgotten classical past, and the careful efforts to recreate its original sound in recordings. We experience classical music today through the forgotten composers brought back to fabulous life by musicologists and audio engineers, not the dry postwar modernisms shunned by the public. This story Mr. Ross does not tell us at all.

What would make his survey really useful is an annotated bibliography for each chapter, showing us where to get the information barely hinted at here, along with a discography more detailed than a single page. Ross' survey is smoothly readable; it's just that you're on your own if you want anything more. And I do envy Ross for getting two paychecks for the same work, from his magazine and from his publisher.

Ross's musical erudition and insight are beyond reproach, and his historical research is thorough. His writing style is intelligent and scholarly, but still very conversational and enjoyable to read. I'm inspired to listen to a whole host of works I've never heard, and to listen with fresh ears to the old workhorses (Rite of Spring, Concerto for Orchestra, etc.).

Still, I can't give the book five stars, because it gives precious little attention to two of the most important phenomena affecting 20th-century music:
1. The separation of composer's duties from performer's duties;
2. The influence of recording technology on music.

So, despite its many virtues, the book falls frustratingly short of the mark.

I was given this book as a gift. I learned soooooooooo many new words. I finally decided to keep the dictionary with the book, because it seemed I had to look up two or three words per page. The author must have an amazing vocabulary -- I now have far better dictionary skills!!
I've read Mr Ross's columns in the New Yorker and didn't find them as wordy as this book . His editor might need to reread The Elements of Style by Strunk, White and Angell (just a suggestion).

There are other, better books on music history.
Mr Ross is sometimes plain wrong. To be very short, for example, he overlooks Prokofiev First Piano Concert as the real event in his graduation in the conservatory (and in russian music of the period); he does not differentiate communist and nazist treatment of music and musicians; he writes that Klemperer left Germany, which is notoriously not true.
In my opinion, Mr Ross gives too much space to atonalism, post atonalism and to contemporary or so called avant gard music (Stockhausen, Boulez, Tippett, Cage, etc), which is listened to by more or less 0,1-0,2% of classic and modern music lovers, because, more than music, it is basically applied science or philosophy of NOISE.
Ross talks and talks on the interconnectedness of music, but in terms of facts, he denies it. Popular music and jazz music are almost ignored.
The Beatles are 1.000.000 times more important than Boulez, and Ellington, Zappa, Emerson Lake and Palmer or Prince have more musical sense than Cage or other noise experimentators.
It is sad to have to deal, in 2008, with the silly, arrogant and irrilevant separation between "real" music and popular music.

I usually get books for my husband from our public library. He'll only read nonfiction(he's not a snob,etc., but a retired educator)and many of the books he's interested in are pricey.I had gotten him The Rest Is Noise and he loved the first few pages soooo much that I had to buy it for him from Amazon(great price). He keeps telling me about the different composers that are written abt in the book and how a lot of the info is new to him after reading many other books abt those same composers.My husband has a Ph'd in Music Education and if he loves this book, it has to be something special!

Alex Ross accomplishes here what only great writers do by making a potentially dry subject come alive. Reading this book only made me want to learn more about the music, the composers, and the times that influenced and were influenced by what they did. Like any book about music, I found myself breaking from the page to seek out the sounds described wherever they were able to be found quickly (Amazon is a great source!). Whoever the smartalek was that said "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" is soundly proven wrong by this book.

This book gave me at least SOME idea of what 20th century and early 21st century classical music is about, and that is exactly what I wanted. I was slow to like modern classical but it gradually grew on me, over the last 20 years. I grew to like the passionate edginess and reality that atonality brings out. Alex Ross does of good job of explaining how we got here through the ambient cultures, politics, wars, dictators, and time itself. Surprisingly, to me at least, atonality began about a hundred years ago with the 12-tone music of Arnold Shoenberg. But since then we've gone through minimalism, though Philip Glass and others are still there, and we are now in something called post-minimalism that John Adams and others are into. Tonality, I understand from the book, is even making a comeback. On the other end of the spectrum, there is experimental classical music that combines any popular or extant ethnic or national genre and can be enhanced by improvisation, electronics, creative time-shifted track layering, basically anything you can think of. If we were in the '60's, we would call it "far-out!". I'm still trying to adjust to atonality so I probably won't go there myself.

Ross is an eloquent and efficient writer. I was almost awed by how much he knows, but he makes himself accessible enough (though his interspersed brief technical explanations were beyond me). I'll never be an expert in music, but I'm a little better off for having read his book.

There are two aspects to this book - the literal and the revelation. The literal has been described elsewhere in these reviews variously as exhilarating and astonishing. I totally agree. The massive research, the easy familiarity with the most obscure observations, and the impact of the historical context makes this book well worth owning.

The revelation came in the form of explaining why we hate modern classical music so very much. The reason is poetry. Modern classical music is like modern poetry; if you can't read it, you can't appreciate it. Imagine hearing a poem by e e cummings. Unless you see the text, you've missed the lack of punctuation, the spacing, the geometric splashing of the words on paper. You've missed 90% of it by only hearing it.

So with modern classical music. Unless you can read music, and have the music in front of you, you cannot possibly appreciate the progressions, the geometry, the calculus of the piece. That is why composers cited by Ross have taken their bows facing the orchestra, sticking their butts out towards the audience. The audience be damned; they can't possibly appreciate it. Only musicians can enter the temple. At numerous points towards the end, melody is identified as a horror to be avoided at all costs. Astonishing peer pressure among composers ensures that no one steps out of line and writes something pleasant to hear. The objective is to break new ground in sound, but call it music.

You can look at modern classical as movie soundtrack, and of course many composers earned their living that way. They fill in moods, complement scenes, create atmospheres. But even that has gone away. Today, it's all about mathematics, it seems. Twelve tones, interminable repetition, and instrument abuse are the cornerstones as composers seek to stand out from the pack.

Too bad. The public just wanted a diverting night out on the town. A tune they could hum on the way home. Composers have joined the establishment in their own anti-establishment way. Like banks and health insurance companies - the customer be damned. We're doing what we want, for us. Period. Alex Ross explains it all in fascinating detail. My only criticism is his website. How wonderful it would be if every musical description in the book had a sound file counterpart, referenced to that same chapter and page, on the website. Then we could hear what he described in such incredible detail and evaluate and appreciate his analysis and description of it. Maybe even fit it into context. As it stands, there are some clips, but that's about it. Too bad, but hardly a reason not to buy this important work of love.

If you would like to know more than you do now about classical composition in the first half of the twentieth century, The Rest Is Noise is a valuable resource. If you are curious about what happened from 1950 through today in classical composing, you'll get a thumbnail sketch of what the most experimental composers did.

I loved the title. How many times I've heard people describe music that employs dissonance or isn't to their taste as "just noise."

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has fun with that concept by suggesting that various types of classical music written since Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring often have more in common than you would expect. His constant references back to common elements among the schools is a particular strength of this book.

Mr. Ross clearly favors those works that have gained the broadest audiences. Those who mainly experiment for themselves and small audiences don't receive much attention, even when their advances are conceptually significant for expanding what can be done with composition.

What's the style of the book like? I can best compare it to reading extended program notes where you connect the dots between one night's performances and the rest of the season's series. In addition, he is a little more candid about the personal lives of the composers than most program notes would provide. He seems particularly interested in exploring the homosexual and lesbian tendencies of the composers and the various musical figures he writes about.

I was very impressed by Mr. Ross's ability to explain various innovations, many of which are unfamiliar to me. He employs a combination of metaphors, references to other musical works, and scientific explanations to get the points across. In doing so, he displays excellent ability to conceptualize and to write about music.

My main regret as a I read the book was that it didn't have a companion CD set that would allow me to quickly listen to the works that he is describing. Although I obviously didn't need that for the works that have become standards in the repertoire, many references aren't to anything very standard.

Mr. Ross also seeks to describe the twentieth century as seen through its composers. Although he certainly develops some useful themes like the role that governments play in encouraging and discouraging composition, I thought that this aspect of the book worked less well by being incomplete. But where important themes were addressed, the material certainly was interesting.

"The Rest is Noise:Listening to the Twentieth Century"" by Alex Ross is, overall, an outstanding book, and a genuine contribution to the available literature on twentieth century music. It deals little with the nuts and bolts mechanics that musician/authors too easily default to, i.e. how a composer manipulates notes and rhythms to create a piece of music. Instead, the book frames the last century's wide array of music in a historical and cultural context. The result is often fascinating, and contains the kind of perspective and insight musicians should have more awareness of. The book is rich with information, the writing is lively and articulate, not always easy when the subject is (mostly) instrumental music. The intended audience is a little vague. On the one hand, it contains no excerpts of musical notation, making it accessible for non-musicians, however, if the reader isn't already familiar with much of the century's repertoire before beginning the book he or she might some sections pretty rough.

"The Rest Is Noise" is a valuble book for the discussion of music in the last 109 years. I appreciated the different viewpoints and, especially, the compositions and composers placed in a historical perspective. Being a composer myself, I didn't agree with all of Alex Ross' points, but then that's what makes it such a valuble book for discussion. Funny at times, distressing at others, but always inciteful and entertaining.

Robert Jager

Having read Ross' engaging contributions to the New Yorker -some of them included here- this book was a no-brainer. Anyone with even the slightest interest in the equivalent of the "dark ages" that many 20th century composers conjured up should not hesitate a second.

Very well written and equally engaging this book finds its main strength in its openness to all styles and continents. Although they are minor I would like to point out a few minor weaknesses.

The focus on the works that Ross subjects to some analysis is somewhat curious. Starting the book with Mahler and Strauss, he takes the latter's Salome as a kind of modernist manifesto that inspired many of the Second Viennese School. While there is some justification for Ross' choice, there is ample evidence both by letters comments and scores that Mahler's 6th was way more influential to Schoenberg and his pupils.

While I greatly enjoyed reading about Gershwin visiting Berg, I was struck by the fact that Ross's analysis of the former's Rhapsody in Blue, did not mention the work's central debt to the opening of Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto. A puzzling omission.

Throughout the book the author gracefully acknowledges the biographies that others wrote about the composers under discussion, yet apart from putting things in a well chosen order, the book adds little further depth to these earlier books.

Yet, despite these small concerns Ross did an outstanding job of providing this line up of many usual and some less usual suspects. His analysis of the modern music scene in the sixties is hilarious and he shines when linking musical developments to the societies that "nurtured" them.

Highly Recommended.

This is a magnificent book. Twentieth century music, from the greatness of Mahler and Strauss to the unlistenable wretchedness of contemporary machine music, is covered in a wonderful style and with enviable authority. I recommend this volume to anyone who likes twentieth century music of any kind.

The rest is noise by A. Ross is a superb book. It is truly exciting and makes me want to listen to modern music which I ordinarily don't like. Understanding how composers came to write the way they did makes it alive and understable. I am reading at bedtime and have trouble puting the book down. What amazes me is that even though I cannot follow all the technical aspects ( I have played an instrument and know some music but not much theory), it still captures me.

When you think you have reached the end of your adventures in musical explorations, then you should pick up this book. It is written in a captivating and intriguing style which mixes history, social and psychological considerations to the life and major works of the main XXth century composers. The author (god bless him) excites curiosity and renews enthusiasm for the explosive variety of 'classical' musical invention and thinking from Strauss to Ligety and up to the current postmodern noise, always embedding it in their time and offering a variety of different perspectives to their work. The resulting picture is broad, inclusive and often surprising, as for example in the section on Hitler's fixation with Wagner. The availability of an online companion with additional information and resources is useful to reduce the craving evoked by reading on most of the music described here (just google its title). I have already finished it once, fantasised on the written commentaries on various masterpieces, validated the relevance of the music through selective listening, and now prepare myself to further use the book as a a reference tool for future discoveries.
As to limits, the shift from the european scene to the developments of american music leaves, from a point on, little space for much else; one hopes that future editions might expand on the international scene.
This is excellent value for money. forget about reaching the end of your musical explorations, do yourself a favour, get it now!

whether or not I could download this extraordinary book from its CD into my Nano. Answer: No. "The song names for this CD could not be found online." Thus, nothing but Track numbers that I have been unable to identify again through my Nano menu.
Nevertheless, I would buy this book if it were only etched in runes on papyrus. No musician I, but I am grateful for Mr. Ross's leading me past Verdi (where I have ecstatically stalled for decades) into the 20th century, both with this hardback and this elegantly rendered audiobook.

Much ink has been spilled about modern classical music and the intellectual hurdles that it presents to audiences accustomed to the tunes of the 1800s. While Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso's creations of abstract grotesquery have snaked their way into the mainstream arts culture, Arnold Schoenberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen's masterpieces still belong to that mysterious realm of works that continue to baffle modern audiences with their unconventional takes on composition.

The subject of modern music is no novelty to the shelves of any distinguished bookstore; but the majority of books published on it are often shrouded in the language of academia, often confounding its readers even more than the obtuse sounds penned by its composers. In contrast to many of its predecessors, Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; $30.00) brilliantly disseminates the code of modern music by seamlessly coalescing the history of the 20th century with the great composers who propelled this musical evolution. With his mastery of the languages of music and prose, Ross offers a read that is accessible and thought provoking.

Alex Ross, classical music critic of the New Yorker, has always astounded me with his extraordinarily engaging and highly intelligent music critiques. The Rest is Noise, a seven-year work that culminated in this recent release, is perhaps his finest work to date. Ross' book reads like a novel, with composers like Strauss, Shostakovich, and Copland and political figures like Hitler, Stalin, and Kennedy as characters in the history of modern music. Its narration is a tour de force that sweeps the reader through the 20th century, taking us from genres as diverse as opera, chamber music, and symphonies to jazz, bebop, and tin-pan alley.

The first chapter begins with the music of the early 1900's, a bygone epoch during which Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss reigned as the kings of musical Vienna. These titans had just released two controversial works--Strauss' Biblical sexpot, Salome and Mahler's First Symphony--to a musical audience besotted with the Classical and Romantic traditions. In an age when the world was still recovering from the quasi-atonality of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Mahler and Strauss' more striking musical innovations proved groundbreaking in paving the way for the century's esoteric musical language.

Ross takes us to the war-and-politics-smitten world of Mahler, Strauss, Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Ravel, Sibelius, Janacek, Schoenberg, Krener, Korngold, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Bartok, Berg, Weill, and Webern, all of whom were subjected to the socio-political environment of pre-50's Europe and America. This era is highlighted by the pieces that each of these masters composed during times of war, oppression, liberation, politicking, and racism. The reader sees the world through the eyes of the Jewish Schoenberg composing atonal pieces in a Germany that swore death to Judentum; the patriotic Janacek and Bartok exploring the possibilities of combining folk tunes and ethnic speech modes into their operas and orchestral works; the African-American Duke Ellington reforming jazz during a time when blacks were banned from the white temples of music; and the fiscally cunning Strauss penning operas and tone poems in an environment where collaboration with Jewish musicians could mean death in the Third Reich.

The author winds the clock forward to the decades of Stravinsky, Britten, Varese, Boulez, Messiaen, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Gorecki, and Shostakovich, all of whom caught their audiences at the edge of their seats with unconventional, non-conformist compositions. The reader is treated to extensive analyses of Stravinsky's shocking ballets and orchestral suites, Britten's ventures into operas hinting at homosexual themes, Shostakovich's schizophrenic pieces seesawing between Soviet genius and political slavery, and Messiaen's oddly transfiguring liturgical works. Never before have the musical languages of the avant-garde and the modernist been so lucidly translated, and in here we develop an understanding of the psychological impetus that drove these composers into challenging their audiences with an art form opposite to the musical dialogues of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach.

Included also is a spatter of writings on American composers who forged the distinct musical voice of the New World. Copland the populist, Barber the American Schubert, Ives the modernist, and Cage the Yankee avant-garde are a few of the composers who played seminal roles in shifting the pendulum of musical America from the Old World to the New. Of interest to the admirers of independent music is the section on the minimalist composers Philip Glass, John Adams, and Steve Reich. This triumvirate of composers played huge roles in influencing the work of musicians like Sigur Ros, Björk, the Beatles, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, the Talking Heads, and Sufjan Stevens, each of whose work is brushed on lightly with Ross' incorporation of insight from the century's musical heritage.

As a fitting close to his book, Ross surveys the condition of classical music in the present century. The author stipulates that today's classical composers have achieved the once-impossible task of impregnating their theories into the vernacular language of pop. Music is in a state of flux, and the face of classical composition has metamorphosed from exclusively white to multiracial; from exclusively male to one that includes females; and from sounds deriving purely from classical instruments to those that stem from the most unimaginable sources. Foreign composers like Tan Dun, Unsuk Chin, Toru Takemitsu, Osvaldo Golijov, and Sofia Gubaidulina and even pop geniuses like Björk and Radiohead all play integral roles in transforming the landscape of classical music. This epiphany may come as strange to those who have been cultured to believing that great classical music stopped with the death of Tchaikovsky, but cultural and gender diversity have recently played integral roles in shaping the way we listen to the world.

In the end, Ross' book addresses a subject that is relevant even outside the musical sphere. You don't have to be a lover of classical music to thoroughly enjoy the wealth of insights that the author has to offer. And if you do, this book can easily inspire you to listen to the pieces Ross so vividly describes in this fascinating chronicle of cultural and musical history. Even now, as I listen to the closing pages of Berg's 3 Pieces for Orchestra, I look back to those pages Ross so generously wrote about the composer's personality and his genius. My understanding of Berg has never been clearer.

I'm more a jazz fan than classical music lover but I was enthralled by an excerpt of "The Rest is Noise" recently published in the New Yorker. The excerpt was about Shostakovich and Copeland's experience in the early days of Cold War America. That is one of the best sections of the book. It delivers on the promise of the subtitle "Listening to the 20th Century." We learn little about these men's music but lots about their position in the culture and how that culture was assaulted by changing political correctness.

There are a few other sections that also carry out this theme; discussions of music and politics in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany but most of the book is a terrifically written and insightful survey of 20th century classical music. Another theme hinted at but never thoroughly explored is how classical music lost its way in the culture. Was politicization a factor? Did composers shy away from significant involvement in the culture (particularly in America) because of the fate of many of their predecessors? I can only pose the question but I would have liked to have heard Ross's answer.

I'm conflicted in my assessment of this excellent book because as a neophyte to classical music, I appreciated the way Ross spoke to me and brought these composers and their music to life. I am now listening to the music he discusses and feel richer for it. On that level, the book is a great success. But as the cultural history as I thought I was being promised, the parts are greater than the whole.

This fat book teaches a lot about 20th Century cutting-edge classical music but relatively little about the more popular 20th Century classical music that grew naturally out of the rich strain of classics that existed at the turn of the century in 1900. That's unfortunate, since a major problem for classical musicians now, early ib the 21st Century, is how to make a living in a field that is losing popularity in America and Europe.

For example, Gian Carlo Menotti made good money from his hour-short TV operas like "Amahl and the Night Visitors" and at the same time provided an immense resource of fuel for school and amateur groups to produce those operas and help keep classical music alive. Yet Menotti appears in Ross's book only twice, once in a list of musicians invited to the White House, and once in a list of musicians who were gay or bisexual.

In defense of Ross, the book is already large enough to limit its sale, but his clever title suggests that only the musicians he chose to write about created music-- the rest is just noise. Not so! Someone needs to write a book-- "The Best of the Rest" maybe-- to tell more people how much good listening can be heard from Samuel Barber, Paul Creston, Erno Dohnanyi, Alberto Ginastera, Ferde Grofe, Howard Hanson, Alan Hovhaness, Zoltan Kodaly, John Rutter, William Schuman, Randall Thompson, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, to name just a few.

Nonetheless, Ross has taught me a lot from his high horse. May he gallop on many years more. Professor Howard Tompkins, Retired

Alex Ross has the ability and the resources to write about the music of the 20th Century and to establish himself as the creator of the definitive volume with the publication of THE REST IS NOISE: LISTENING TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. His depth of knowledge is matched only by his ability to communicate with a writing style that places him in the echelon of our finest biographers. This book is indeed a comprehensive study of the music created in the 20th Century, but it is also a survey of all of the arts and social changes, effects of wars, industrialization, and quirks and idiosyncrasies that surfaced in that recently ended period of history: Ross may call this 'listening' to the 20th century, but is also visualizing and feeling the changes of that fascinating period.

Ross opens his survey with a detailed description of the premiere of Richard Strauss' opera SALOME and in doing so he references all of those in attendance (from Mahler to Schoenberg, the last of the great Romantics to the leader of the Modernist innovators) and focuses not only on the chances Strauss took using a libidinous libretto by the infamous Oscar Wilde to the astringent dissonances that surface in this tale of evil and necrophilia. The ballast of that evening is then followed throughout the book, a means of communicating music theory and execution in a manner that is wildly entertaining while simultaneously informative.

Ross studies the influence of nationalism in music (the German School, the French School, the British and the American Schools) and then interweaves the particular innovations by showing how each school and each composer was influenced by the simultaneous destruction and reconstruction of the world borders resulting form the wars of that century. He dwells on the pacifists (Benjamin Britten et al) and those trapped by authoritarian regimes (Shostakovich et al), following the great moments as well as the dissonant chances that found audience at times far from the nidus of origin. Ross crosses the 'pond' showing how American music nurtured in the European schools ultimately found grounding in a sound peculiar to this country (Ives, Copland, etc) and allows enough insight as to the influence of jazz to finally satisfy the most critical of readers.

Ross, then, accompanies us on the journey from melody to atonality and back, all the while giving us insights into the composers that help us understand the changes in music landscape they induced. The book is long and demanding, but at the same time it is one of the finest 'novels on a music theme' ever written. Highly recommended not only to musicologists, ardent music lovers, and students of the arts, but to the reading public who simply loves history enhanced by brilliant prose. Grady Harp, December 07

Was just thinking how great a stocking stuffer this book would be for lovers of classical music. With the holidays fast approaching, I'm starting to compile my shopping list. Books have always been my favorite stocking stuffer. Much better than the mindless toys and trinkets most people give.

Searched Amazon.com's bestsellers for each category and here are some stocking stuffer suggestions...

For Baby Boomers: "You: Staying Young: The Owner's Manual for Extending Your Warranty (You)"

For College Students: "How To Ace Your Way Through College and Still Have a Life"

For Young Girls: "The Daring Book for Girls"

For Young Boys: "Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy"

For Moms with Small Children: "Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food"

For Working Women: "Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny"

For Men: "Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices, & Priorities of a Winning Life"

For Entrepreneurs: "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich"

It is now over a month. I have NOT received the book. I am angry. Why??

I am a longtime admirer of Alex Ross's pieces in The New Yorker. This book is everything I would have expected from him. It is attractively presented and contains an amazing amount of information about twentieth-century music. But it goes further than simply providing information about the music written during the course of the century; it presents Ross's views about the interconnections between the many different styles which are to be found during the last century. Ross's writing is, as always, clear, concise, cogent, perceptive and engaging.

For someone who has cherished classical music for over fifty years, during which time I and my wife dutifully listened to a lot of cacaphonous and self impressed "contemporary" music, this book provides a wonderful balance of useful background and explanation of what we heard and what the forces were that created it. There is a serous and useful attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff. The writing is clear and occasionally humorous. Even though the author is not himself a musician, he does sometimes go off on fairly technical tangents, but readers like me can skip these.

Alex Ross has written a rollicking ride of a book framing the historic course of classical music through the 20th century. It's a book needed nowadays. Important writing on classical music is rare enough, but a contribution of this caliber is an extraordinary gift to musicians and laymen alike. For me, particularly poignant are the fearless and tender pages on Britten, including his deep personal and artistic friendship with Shostakovich. As a musician who already knows the historical outline, I find it bracing and rewarding that throughout 600+ pages, scarcely 10=15 pages pass without a quotation, fact, or observation that is completely new to me and quite often astonishing. On top of that, Ross' artistic intelligence and analytical skills are among the finest around, and a smooth as glass command of English prose makes every page a fascinating and memorable joy to read. Regular New Yorker readers are fortunately familiar with this fellow's gifts - indeed, his contribution there remains one of the big reasons to continue subscription to that magazine. For anyone seeking a truly comprehensive traversal of the 20th century's arc of musical progress delivered with luminous erudition AND heart, an intensely confident recommendation.

Alex Ross has written an incredibly engaging and informative book, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's the story of the 20th Century as told through the lens of classical composition with relevant nods to jazz, Broadway, rock, and other genres. It's an amazing, must read for anyone interested in classical music and a really compelling one for anyone who wants to read about the 20th Century seen in a different light. Ross' descriptions of each composers' works are so visceral that they work for non-musicians like myself, too. He's included enough recommended recordings and other references to keep us all happy and busy for some time. He offers his readers a deep understanding of how music and societal context co-create again and again. Ross also brings a welcome sense of humor and enthusiasm to this novel-like read. Buy this book!

Even if you don't think you are interested in what most people think of as serious twentieth-century music, this book will challenge your existing attitudes and inform you along the way. Recommended to anyone who spent any time living during the century that was. This book is a page turner in every sense of the phrase. And what amazing synthesis.

Alex Ross' excellent book is what you might call a 'social' history. He doesn't ignore the analytical side (though following recent practice, there isn't a single bit of notation in the whole book) and gives pretty good prose evocations of how a lot of music was put together--Webern's partition of a twelve tone row into three-note segments, for example--but focuses rather on the whole flow of things, on the relationships between composers and with society. He isn't afraid to quote Webern's sycophantic praise of the Third Reich, for example.

The book is non-ideological in the sense that he steps back and views the infighting and political jockeying for position from outside. It becomes clear that virtually all 20th century music is political or politicized to a considerable degree. Or suffers from politics! The truth Ross isn't afraid to recount is that a lot of 20th century composers, especially among the 'progressives', were playing the avant-garde game of achieving fame through being merely annoying. Many accounts of 20th century music, when they weren't mere chronicles, are either dryly analytical or manifestos for one camp or another (such as Rene Leibowitz' book on Schoenberg and his school).

Ross is particularly keen to rescue certain composers from the condescension of the 'progressives'. Three in particular are Sibelius, Shostakovich and Britten. Boulez comes across as a particularly nasty piece of work on the condescending side. There is a large section on Hitler's musical tastes which is surprisingly relevant because, as Ross points out, it was the Nazis and their love of certain music (and in return the loyalty a remarkable number of composers and conductors showed them, Karajan, for example) that cost 'classical' music its moral authority. He points out that, pre-WWII, classical music was coded in popular culture with higher things. But afterward, we find that every villain loves classical music. The example that springs to mind is Hannibal Lector and the Goldberg Variations.

One interesting point Ross makes is that while there were few religious pieces written by major composers in the 19th century, the 20th century teems with them--everyone from Stravinsky to Messaien to Arvo Part. (He calls works like the Verdi and Berlioz Requiems concert music with Latin text, which is fair enough.)

Ross' book reminds me that we tend to forget how really beautiful a lot of 20th century music is: Messaien, Stravinsky (Symphony of Psalms), Shostakovich, Part, Adams and on and on. I will forgo the near-obligatory list of people he left out or said too much about.

This book is possibly the best history of 20th century music I have read and I have read most of them. It is refreshingly free of adherence to one camp or another and, while idiosyncratic, is enjoyably so. I would say that this would be the book on 20th century music I would most recommend even to a non-musician.

The subtitle of this book is "Listening to the Twentieth", and that what Alex Ross does. The result is a slightly idiosyncratic reading of twentieth century composition -- all the highlights and big names are here, more or less, but Ross is here to tell the story his way. (His longish foray into the tragic life of Sibelius is fascinating, though he's composer who wasn't well served by modernity, and could be characterized as the last 19th century composer, despite dying in 1957.)

Ross loves this music, and it's clear that he lives with the pieces he writes about. He write with affectionate detachment throughout, and doesn't gloss over the moral failings of great artists (Strauss in particular is shown to be tragically bullheaded) He dips lightly into musicology and often meanders into funny, sometimes dishy, anecdotes about these sometimes comically grave characters that made music in the twentieth century. Ross also is willing to let the music speak for itself -- odd to say about a book, I know -- but in this book Ross is very careful about decoupling the music from the pretensions of its creators.

I can't speak for true music people, but if your curious dilletante like me, this book is invaluable.

As a veteran reviewer in another arena (medicine), I can attest to the fact that is far easier to point out what has been left out of a book than to focus upon what has been selected for inclusion in it.

Yes, Alex Ross has short-changed some composers and some types of music in the 20th century. Unfortunately, some who have reviewed this book here have preferred to dwell upon Alex Ross's slighting of this or that composer or of a sort of electo-something music they favor and have given the book one, two or three stars out of pique.

"The Rest is Noise" is an extraordinary work. It is clearly the most engrossing and insightful account to appear of classical music in the 20th century. It merits five stars.

The lack of attention to electro-acoustic music, a vital force in Western culture today displays a tremendous lack of understanding. The assumption that one's sexual orientation has anything to do with the kind of music one composes is outrageous. Some of the musicological anecdotes are interesting when Ross writes about his favorites (Sibelius, Reich, Britten) but nobody should compare this volume to a serious history of 20th century music. Ross is a critic - often an astute one - but his xenophobic prejudices make this volume of only passing interest.

This book is meticulously researched and scholarly, but I have discovered from an inside source at Farrer, Strauss & Ghoul that the book has been heavily redacted for reasons which will be apparent. It is at grave risk that I am able to present to you here one of the pages they left out of the book before it went to market:

" . . . Then in 1908 there came a stunning event which set the musical world on its ear (so to speak). The irredentist-pointillist composer and theorist Albrecht von Tizler composed the most radical and advanced work of any, his masterpiece "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," a work which expresses more from its lacunae than what is revealed in the score.

In bar one and again in bar four, there is a dramatic gap, pregnant in its silence, between the shouts of "Take" and "me." In his analysis of the cantata, Ludwig Wittgenstein has postulated that this is obviously a reference to the composer's homosexuality. Although traditionalists have denounced this as obtrectation, it becomes manifest at the shout of "Root! Root! Root!" which follows the driving, ineluctable series of notes D-B-A-G-F-D-C, a whole-tone scale mad with both petulance and concupiscence, the same whole tone scale as first used by Franz Liszt in the fifth of his Etudes Transcendentale, "Feux Follets."

The profane nature of this passage is emphasized by the fact that it is preceded by the truculent use of a series of sinister tritones concealed inside an A7 chord with its C# which clashes horribly - though beautifully - against the key of C-major that had lulled us into a sense of Gemütsruhe. Any possible doubt as to the psycho-sexual nature of this music has been deracinated with Richard von Krafft-Ebing's discovery of yet another tritone in the music's penultimate chord, played while the word "Ball" is shrieked.

In a work so conspicuously filled tritones and their imprecations, it is little wonder that this song has been suppressed, but in the Schlaffhaube museum in Kilchberg, one can view the manuscript of Thomas Mann's "Unordnung und frühes Leid," and see that the words, "if - they - don't - win - it's - a - shame" are underlined whenever they appear on a page. The same phenomenon has been found in Jean Genet's "Un Captif Amoureux."

The next homosexual composer of this period is . . . "

The book is great. GREAT!!! As a classical musician, I really appreciate the time and effort Mr. Ross puts into writing and discussing the state of music today. There are MANY great stories and a ton of great information in "The Rest is Noise", and I look forward now to reading it a second time. I learned a great deal about some my favorite composers, as well as composers I did not know very much about. It's been several years since I took my music history classes at college, and this was a great refresher and an eye-opener in many respects. Thank you for the wonderful book!! Highly recommended.

All one needs to know about this book is that it gives as much space to one Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, as it does to the three greatest American composers of the 20th century (Ives, Gershwin and Ellington.) To devote 20 pages (not including incidental references) to Sibelius and barely six to Ives is a travesty, and it demonstrates that the author, like most of his "classical" critical colleagues, has yet to understand the musical and social significance of American music. Mr. Ross is, purely and simply, ignorant, and his book is insulting.

A history of 20th century music with the history left out, thankfully. Ross writes vividly about specific compositions and imparts his enormous enthusiasm. Everyone who dips into this book will compile a list of works to hear. His avidity is a model for other listeners: he approaches Metataseis with the same eager expectation of enjoyment as the Firebird. And happily his enthusiasm is focused solely on the music--the ideologies, manifestoes, movements and politics of 20th century classical music he approaches with extreme scepticism. He is especially good at teasing apart a composer's words from a composer's music. Naturally he has preferences: he provides several full-length portraits of Strauss and Stravinsky at different points in their long careers, and movingly profiles Shostakovich and Britten, but Schoenberg and Cage appear more as instigators than artists, and Boulez is given up as an obnoxious enigma. But overall, I can't imagine a better guide. While modernism in the visual arts has been pretty much embraced by culture at large (e.g. the crowds at MOMA or Tate Modern), musical modernism, the tradition of 20th century classical music, has not. Whatever the explanation, Alex Ross thinks it's a shame that more people don't know it and love it. He certainly loves it, and it's prompted some of the best writing on music since Bernard Shaw.

This magisterial book will, for many years, remain the definitive account of classical music (or art music, if you prefer) in the twentieth century, from the time of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler to the age of Steve Reich and John Adams. Ross situates his history of an art form within the swirl of contemporary developments in culture and politics. The many individual stories of composers and their chief works are unified through the use of literary themes, the philosophical musings of Theodor Adorno and a close analysis of Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faust. Along the way, Ross gives us an absolutely riveting account of the musical scene in the Third Reich, covering the composers who stayed and were complicit with the regime, as well as those artists who either fled or perished. He covers music in the concentration camps and the life of composers under Soviet dictatorship. He makes links between modern performance practice and the rise of jazz, bebop and adventurous rockers like the Beatles and Radiohead. His knowledge is encyclopedic and his research prodigous. Here and there his enthusiasms betray him. The heavy emphasis on German music as the spine of musical development turns Wagner into the main 19th century ancestor to modern music, a leit motive throughout the book; he scants the incipient modernisms of Tchaikovsky and the Russian School, the contributions of Liszt, Berlioz and other French composers. The chapter on Sibelius is so long it feels like a Bruckner symphony, ditto the scene by scene analysis of Britten's opera Peter Grimes; these sections are among the few longeurs encountered in a historical text that generally reads like a mystery novel. This book is highly recommended for anyone who is afraid of modern music but be warned, it will make you go out and compulsively expand your library of discs!

This book, is like, totally awesome. This and David Halbestram's latest book are my two favorites of the year. I acknowledge that this review is totally unhelpful, just wanted to give some online-props. Mazel-Tov!!