Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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146 of 149 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
unlikely to help you with that cd storage problem..., 23 May 2008
Given that whole books could be written about virtually every single composer Alex Ross mentions in this mammoth survey, you'd be forgiven for thinking that 'The Rest is Noise' would be heavy on filler and light on critical insight. Whilst it's fair to say that as the musical world diversifies post-1950, Ross spends less and less time looking at the work of individual composers - this should take nothing away from an astounding work of scholarship.
Like any critic, Ross clearly has his own tastes and prejudices - composition to him is at its best when it addresses a popular audience. It's therefore unsurprising that he devotes more pages to composers such as Mahler, Strauss, Stravinksy, Sibelius and Britten over the 20th century's kookier figures. However, Ross is not simply bolstering the canon - Cage, Feldman, La Monte Young and Harry Partch are all given warm appraisals, even though none of them have been absorbed into the contemporary repertory.
Ross is gifted with a both a keen analytical ear (and eye) and a great generosity of spirit. Whilst he explores the darker totalitarian affiliations of composers such as Strauss, Webern, Orff and Shostakovich, he redeems them all from the blunt considerations of popular myth. In fact the only figure in the whole book who is subject to undisguised contempt is Pierre Boulez. In Ross' account he comes across as an arrogant, two-faced hypocrite - capable of acts of quite atrocious slander towards the very composers who made his work possible (Messiaen, Schoenberg, Stravinsky). It says a lot about Ross, that despite this he still finds time to admire Boulez's 'Marteau sans Maitre'.
Ross writes about music vividly, combining technical analysis with metaphorical explanations - so if, like me, you wouldn't know a tritone if it hit you over the head with a sausage, there's plenty here to provoke and engage. As far as I know, the only book covering similar ground to this is Michael Hall's 'Leaving Home' (written as a companion to the excellent TV series). Hall's book is definitely worth tracking down, even if it is sometimes a little technically abstruse its approach.
Ross' historical approach is enriching and rewarding - this is a rigorously researched book with a deeply humane tone- I don't expect to come across a better work of non-fiction this year.
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37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant and compelling, 30 Dec 2008
I was given this hefty book for Christmas. Five days later I have just finished it, and I've read one of my other Christmas presents in the meantime.
Alex Ross is one of the wisest music critics I have read. He appears to have listened to more or less everything and read more or less everything there is to read about the music - and "the music" in this instance consists not just of all the "serious" music composed in the last hundred years but also all of the popular stuff. He is as acute about Sonic Youth, Bjork or Public Enemy as he is about Benjamin Britten or Morton Feldman.
Modern music is not much listened to, and part of the virtue of this book is that it suggests a reason why that's so. Part of it has to do with the way modern music went in the middle of the 20th century: the composers started to take pride in writing music that they wanted to be unpopular. "The Rest is Noise" has a moment of sublime comedy early on: the premiere of Richard Strauss' opera "Salome" was a huge success, and Strauss's fellow composer Gustav Mahler was highly perplexed because he thought it was a work of genius, and therefore couldn't understand why the public seemed to like it.
I personally am a fan of some of the more more forbidding early modernist composers, and Ross has a refreshing lack of piety towards people I admire, such as Schoenberg and Webern. Ross evidently finds the former to be authoritarian, while he finds it hard to forgive the latter's naive and rather schoolboyish enthusiasm for Hitler. But Ross also blows away a lot of the cultural-war nonsense about modern music, always treating the music itself with far more respect than the nonsense sometimes talked by the composers. Pierre Boulez, for example, comes out of the book like the great composer he is, but also as a mischievous and self-serving troublemaker whose aggression as a young critic almost certainly did more harm than good.
Ross is perhaps most sympathetic towards troubled, haunted composers with damaged personalities who faced external difficulties and who didn't always face them with aplomb: Britten, Shostakovich, Sibelius. These are three of the most poignant figures in the book - Britten the gay man haunted by his attraction to underage males, Shostakovich desperately ploughing on under the looming menace of the Soviet system, Sibelius drinking himself into silence. In all cases, Ross has a fantastic ability to make you think that the music is worth listening to. He sends me back to my CD of Britten's "Peter Grimes" with renewed determination.
I am not convinced by the sections on minimalism, but neither I think is Ross. There is significantly less fire and intensity in the chapters on Steve Reich and Philip Glass, perhaps because neither of them are very interesting composers. Ross gets noticeably more enthusiastic when he passes on to lesser-listened-to figures such as Morton Feldman, Helmut Lachenmann or Thomas Adés - although there is some fine stuff in appreciation of John Adams, who is hardly obscure.
A great book, it seems to me, one which is properly detailed in its coverage of how the music works and why it matters, but which is also completely accessible to the common reader. I wish it were twice as long. Anyone who loves music should read it, and then listen to some of this stuff.
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61 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Composing Classical Music from 1900-1950, 11 Feb 2008
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.
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