for themselves. If it does encourage more people to explore, it will be a work of cultural importance’
Prospect
‘The Rest is Noise looks set to become the definitive reference point for everyone who loves modern music’
LRB
‘Alex Ross, music critic at the New Yorker, has confronted this colossal task with all the necessary qualities and produced a book that makes some sense of the most convoluted musical century of human history. Ross takes the extremes, the wild diversity and contradictions as manifest realities to be understood through their relationships, rather than antagonisms that must cancel each other out’
The Wire
‘Full of material you really need to savour. It is the superb selection of image and anecdote that makes this book work so well. Warm, joyful and unfailingly adroit in his evocation of music in words – Ross, with this book, establishes himself as the supreme champion of modern music’
Sunday Times
By the same author
Listen to This
For my parents and Jonathan
It seems to me … that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits, for whose absolute reliability in matters of human reason and dignity I would not exactly want to put my hand in the fire. That I am nevertheless devoted to it with all my heart is one of those contradictions which, whether a cause for joy or regret, are inseparable from human nature.
—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
| HAMLET: | … —the rest is silence. | |
| HORATIO: | Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! [March within.]Why does the drum come hither? |
Contents
Suggested Listening and Reading
About the Publisher
In the spring of 1928, George Gershwin, the creator of Rhapsody in Blue, toured Europe and met the leading composers of the day. In Vienna, he called at the home of Alban Berg, whose blood-soaked, dissonant, sublimely dark opera Wozzeck had had its premiere in Berlin three years earlier. To welcome his American visitor, Berg arranged for a string quartet to perform his Lyric Suite, in which Viennese lyricism was refined into something like a dangerous narcotic.
Gershwin then went to the piano to play some of his songs. He hesitated. Berg’s work had left him awestruck. Were his own pieces worthy of these murky, opulent surroundings? Berg looked at him sternly and said, “Mr. Gershwin, music is music.”
If only it were that simple. Ultimately, all music acts on its audience through the same physics of sound, shaking the air and arousing curious sensations. In the twentieth century, however, musical