If you’re a regular reader of Alex Ross’s music criticism in The New Yorker, you already know the erudition, breadth of knowledge, and sheer ambition he brings to essays on every conceivable subject from Verdi to Radiohead. Those qualities are on abundant display in The Rest Is Noise, which aspires to be not just a history of 20th-century music but a history of the 20th century told through the history of music.
Beginning with the scandalous premiere of Strauss’s Salome and ending with a study of John Adams’s Nixon in China, Ross’s first book (out October 16) is always mindful of how events directly shape art: There could be no Aaron Copland without the Great Depression and the New Deal, and no Kurt Weill without the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism. (And no Bob Dylan without Kurt Weill.) The book also reminds us that there was once a time when serious composers partied, Us Weekly–style, with celebrities, fellow artists, and heads of state. At 624 pages, it bites off a lot, but it also gives you plenty to chew on.
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, Giroux; hardcover; 624 pages)
Alex Ross’s blog
Ask.com for The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
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