160 of 182 people found the following review helpful:
unlikely to help you with that cd storage problem...
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...
127 of 139 people found the following review helpful:
Over-hyped perhaps?
This has been the subject of a great deal of hype but (perhaps because of that) I found I didn't enjoy it very much. Anyone looking for something as crisply written and as intellectually stimulating as, say, The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes is likely to be disappointed. It's a curiously baggy and unfocussed book, which perhaps reflects some of the difficulties...
This has been the subject of a great deal of hype but (perhaps because of that) I found I didn't enjoy it very much. Anyone looking for something as crisply written and as intellectually stimulating as, say, The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes is likely to be disappointed. It's a curiously baggy and unfocussed book, which perhaps reflects some of the difficulties surrounding modern music and its reception among the cultured classes, where it's OK not to know Schoenberg's Five Pieces For Orchestra, but not OK not to know The Waste Land; OK to not know Elliott Carter but not OK not to know Jackson Pollock; where a person might reasonably be expected to have read Wittgenstein's Tractatus but no one is expected to have listened to Le marteau sans maitre It's difficult to imagine a work like this about literature or the fine arts being welcomed so ecstatically.
It seems as if the author unsure who his real audience might be. Much of the first half for instance is made up of potted biographies of composers. These are all very well but that's all they are: potted biographies - the kind of thing most music lovers have already gleaned from sleeve notes. And while Ross is busy making us "at home" with his chosen composers he is neglecting to write about the one thing that makes them interesting - the music that was their life's work. Of course he can write well about music, often very well. There's a marvellous page about the end of Jenufa; he writes feelingly about Berg; and there is an excellent chapter "Beethoven was Wrong" on contemporary American minimalism.
But there are also strange lapses. Benjamin Britten is obviously someone Ross admires both as a man and as a musician, yet he has curious way of showing it. The reader is treated to pedestrian slog through Peter Grimes, a crushingly detailed plot synopsis with musical footnotes, and then an even more dispiriting trudge through Death in Venice. The choice of works has a superficial logic to it - the two operas bracket a career and enable Ross to talk about Britten's homosexuality - but the writing conveys little of the excitement and special atmosphere of this music, while sidelining The Turn of the Screw which many consider Britten's masterpiece.
Anyone thunderstruck by Birtwistle's Mask of Orpheus or Carter's Symphony for Three Orchestras, or who has been ravished by some delectable bit of Roberto Gerhard, and wants to know more, or who has seen the DVD of King Priam and wants to explore the rest of Tippett's operas, will find no succour here. Or if you were thinking it was about time to grapple with Skalkottas , Xenakis, Rautavaara or Wolfgang Rihm and were looking for something to help you along, some indication of where to start, the kind of thing you might encounter, or even whether the effort would be worth making, you would look in vain.
The book also has a political bias typical of the time and place of writing - New York in the early years of the 21st century. This means that no progressive movement or endeavour can be mentioned without a condescending sneer. Composers of the thirties and fifties come in for an especially hard time. This is not just irritating, it is also completely a-historical. Even a brief flip through The Road to Wigan Pier or The Grapes or Wrath - to look no further - ought to be enough to show that there were plenty of people in the 1930s who had good reason to have anti-capitalist feelings and that to be against the status quo was not invariably the mark of a dupe or a scoundrel. There is sense too that there is something weird and personal going on when the book swerves aside twice to belabour the Brecht/Eisler The Measures Taken (surely not a very important work in the musical scale of things), characterising it the second time as "terrorist chic". This is a remark which might go down well at a Manhattan dinner party but ought never to have made it into print. Brecht's play is about political activists and labour organisers, not terrorists. The two are not at all the same thing, though perhaps Ross is here angling for a seat on the board of Wal-Mart. (And where, it seems fair to ask, were the much-vaunted fact checkers in all this?). There's some odd ideological wobbling too over European arts subsidy, about which Ross is generally disparaging, while praising the BBC, which he credits for the liveliness of London's new music scene.
The book's biggest disappointment however is that it is unlikely to send the reader rushing to the concert hall or record store to seek out new experiences or back to the CD collection to listen to old favourites with new ears. It's a pity that all the publicity may mean that other, better, more thought-provoking writers about 20th century music are in danger of being overlooked. These include Paul Griffiths (studies of individual composers, collected reviews and his short history of Western music); Andrew Porter (collected reviews); and Charles Rosen (on Schoenberg and Carter). And of course there are many composers who have written brilliantly about their own music and that of their contemporaries, in particular Elliott Carter, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Robin Holloway, Hugh Wood and, certainly not least, Arnold Schoenberg whose essay Brahms the Progressive is almost extravagantly ear-opening. None of these are as comprehensive as The Rest is Noise but they communicate a lot more pleasure and are likely to lead to better listening.
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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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The chaotic development of "classical" music during the twentieth century has long been due an inquest. We need answers to questions such as - how did the strange chains of noises that we have been invited to listen to come about; which of them make any sense; and which of them will people want to listen to in a hundred years' time. Alex Ross has attempted to chart here "the fate of composition in the twentieth century" - roughly the first of the above three questions - and has done so with limited success. His book does not make much of the second or third questions, and more importantly suffers from being heavily flawed on many matters, both general and detailed.
To be fair, the subject is immense. Many publishers would have assembled a team of experts under a project manager to ensure a balanced response. Here we just get Ross' opinion, which inevitably means an enormous loss of balance. He is first a journalist, only second a music critic, and when he tries to interpolate his views on how wider global events impacted the development of composition, the reader faces some bizarre distortions. Occasionally the wider references are useful, such as when Ross traces the roots of Darmstadt to OMGUS, the Office of Military Government, United States. More often they are a distraction or even seriously contentious and disruptive, for example in a lengthy and fundamentally irrelevant section devoted to Hitler's interest in Wagner's music, which could not seriously be held to have had a far-reaching impact upon twentieth-century composition.
Ross is at his best in assessing composers such as Messaien, where there is relatively little journalistic anecdote material to distract him. It is weakest where the side-material carries greatest journalistic "spice" - Schoenberg is introduced with a wildly unlikely story of him as a 74-year-old shouting in a Los Angeles supermarket that he never had syphilis, for example, and Ross gets hopelessly swept away in trying to engage with Britten's interest in boys. As a result Britten gets 35 pages of this 543-page book. By contrast, seminal figures such as Bartok and Janacek each get less than three pages.
I am keen to encourage you to read the book and think for yourself, but to be prepared for many distortions and obstacles. Ross plainly does not understand far too much about the causes of the developments he describes. He entirely misses the huge achievements of Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez, failing importantly to connect with the "why" behind each core Boulez career decision. He wholly misunderstands Shostakovich, belittling the stresses under which he worked and failing to recognise the central achievement of his 15 quartets. Key independent spirits such as Henze and Xenakis barely get mentioned.
At the more detailed level too, lapses rain thick and fast. There is no space here to list even a sample (if I have time I will add a selection in a separate comment) but one aches for the publisher to have insisted on a properly qualified editor.
Despite this, the subject is of real importance and for all its many faults Ross' book is readable and thought-provoking.
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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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Twentieth Century so-called "classical" music is a big topic to try to deal with but Ross has a good shot at it. Writing about music is always difficult and he occasionally becomes becalmed in language that talks of key progressions, triads, tritones, and the like. So this is not a book that, despite its attempt to be user-friendly, will not be an easy read for someone who does not at least have a smattering of knowledge of musical terms. If you know some of the music mentioned you understand what he is talking about right away; but if you do not then I wonder if his analysis would make the reader want to explore? For example, he makes much of the influence of Richard Strauss' "Salome" (and even its opening chords) in the early part of the book -fascinating for those who know that the soldier Naraboth sings "Wie schon ist die Prinzessin Salome heute abend..." but a little more recondite for those readers who do not have that information or who have not seen the opera.
Where the book scores is in its exploration of the relationships of composers to each other - the bitterly diverging "schools of thought" of the neo-Classicists (like Stravinsky) and the Twelve Tone composers (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and their followers like Boulez). Indeed, the petty rivalries and jealousies - like Boulez and his clique staging disruptions to concerts of their "enemies" - are amongst the most interesting treatments in this book. The chapters about politics, composers and their music - especially featuring the tyrannical regimes of Stalin and Hitler - are absorbing.
My personal response was that I found the chapters that dealt with music I knew much more easy to read that those that dealt with music I had not had much experience of - like American contemporary music. There were sporadic helps, like the pointer as to how to listen to Minimalist music and the "architectural sound-structuralism" of Varese. But all in all I think that this is really an EXPANSION of knowledge book rather than an introduction as such. If you have begun to find your way about in Twentieth Century music then you will find this book a good road-map. And because of the hugeness of the topic and the many excellent sections, that makes the five star rating worthwhile in my opinion.
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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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A communal review for the Cote d'Azure Men's book group of
The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross
Written for the book group by Sidney Freedman and Barry Hibbitt
Music, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the art of combining sound, voices and instruments to achieve beauty, an expression of emotion. Shakespeare's said it more succinctly in Twelfth Night: "if music be the food of love play on."
Many people listen to it for pleasure, whether it be the might of a major orchestra, the wall- to -wall modern or rap music, or for merely a relaxing hour or so while meditating on the meaning of life. A concerto can alter moods, stimulate the senses, hypnotise and encourage soldiers and citizens alike to follow The Flag,.
The Rest is Noise is a scholarly commentary on music allied to history in the twentieth century, from Bruckner to The Beatles; Debussy to Duke Ellington, and covers the lives and works of nearly every musician of note in that century
The group read this book by the music critic of The New Yorker. Most members agreed that it was a good choice. It is up- to- date and many found it enlightening. It opened up a new world of music previously unknown, which they now feel inspired to explore further. Like all books on music it suffers from the disadvantage that one does not hear the music on turning the pages, rather like a programme note at a concert where no music is actually played. However, Alex Ross has to some extent remedied the problem by setting up a web site (www.therestisnoise.com), on which examples of the music he discusses can be found
It was suggested that greater insight into the musical revolution of the 20th century could be found elsewhere. Leonard Bernstein's lecture at Harvard in 1973 under the title of `The Unanswered Question' is one example and, despite being written in the 1930s, Constant Lambert's book Music Ho! is still as good a guide as any, because many of the truly radical changes in music occurred before World War I, when Debussy broke away from the rhetoric of German Romantic music, introducing a style of composition which required its audience to listen with their nerves rather than their minds.
Egon Wellesz, a notable composer of atonal music, gave a somewhat similar answer when asked why for so many listeners modern music was 'a terrible noise', saying that they were listening with the wrong ears! Our attempt to distinguish music from noise led nowhere. At least one member of the group found no problem at all in listening to atonal music. There followed a discussion on why others found it so difficult to assimilate. Could it be that the human ear is attuned to tonality by overtones or harmonics or is it simply the case that we get used to certain sounds?
Our psychologist pointed out that very little is known about the way in which the human ear assimilates music. He knew of only two works that deal with the subject Some earphones, for example, seem to reproduce recorded sound very clearly, but only because the ear supplies the bass tones which are missing
. We all agreed that Ross was very interesting on music both under Stalin and Hitler. There was less agreement on the importance he gives to the operas of Benjamin Britten, although it was recollected that Rostropovich said the 20th century had seen four great composers, of whom three were Russian and the other was Benjamin Britten.'
In a sense the book is more a guide to the icons, their compositions, what drove them to create works of genius and the relationship between classical, modern, rock'n roll and jazz All methods feed off each other. All are meant to entertain with the exception of dirges, requiems and the like, i.e. music for the formal occasion.
We can hear the soulful strings, the urgent trumpets and the rolling of the drums and we can visualise the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin feathering the strings and Jacqueline Du Pre playing Elgar's concerto for cello in E Minor with a passion that overwhelms the senses.
Music of the past fifty years invokes memories for many, from the opening explosion of music that burst upon the world in Star Wars back to the frenzied Rock Around The Clock of Bill Haley and the Comets.
It must be said that, on first reading, one or two members struggled with the book before appreciation set in.. It is a history of one hundred years of music, a compendium that combines historic events with the music of the day. Ross explains the creation and ideas that gave birth to many of the world's most loved works.
He spent fifteen years on this book. Some of his methods may be a bit technical for the average reader, yet seldom has this art form been word painted in better colours.
His scope is vast, from Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler at the debut of Salome in Graz in 1906 to the drum banging battle cries of the two world wars, Shostakovich's patriotic Leningrad and that famous war tribute to Russia that angered Stalin because it was not patriotic enough. Nostalgia; The Warsaw Concerto, The Star-Spangled Banner t he Vietnam peace peons, We will Overcome, then Rock `n Roll era, Let's Twist Again, the modern operas where Ross emphasis the works of Benjamin Britten, in Peter Grimes and Billy Budd operas that spell out an allegiance to a then persecuted section of society.
Within the brotherhood of men- not many women- great names pass by like leaves in the wind, visible one moment and then gone, blown away, but leaving behind the subtle rustling sound of greatness.
Here is the naïve Richard Strauss, rejuvenated for a time and thinking the Nazis are his friends. Finally disillusioned when his daughter-in-law's passport is stamped Sara, the German title given to female Jews. His genius overrides, it seems, his compassion and he works on as millions die in The Holocaust. Many, many fellow musicians play in concentration camps for the death dealing SS, not for their supper but for their lives
Alex Ross has written a splendid book. Those who like music but do not know how or why it was written will find a new world to explore and possibly new sounds of music to enjoy. His superb website is a concert hall, just a few clicks away on the computer, to discover a veritable minefield of musical information. Bravo, Mr Ross, Bravo. END
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As someone with a keen interest in 20th Century music and history, albeit from a layman's perspective, I was attracted to this book as a popular (i.e. not too technical) overview of the music of the last century. It has received some stellar reviews, and while there were pages where I was moved, entertained and/or swept away by the author's passion and enthusiasm, I still found myself feeling ultimately rather disappointed.
Rather than focus on a handful of key figures, or list every single significant composer, the author chooses to place his book somewhere in the middle; unfortunately I found this approach neither detailed enough to be engaging nor complete enough in its overview to give a clear picture of its subject. In fact, I found the writing to be quite repetitive in form - a bit of biographical background, an amusing anecdote linking the composer with another mentioned a few pages previous, and then on to the next name on the list. I started to get bored quite early on!
One or two reviews have commented on the book's bias towards music from the US. I feel that the author is justified in this - he is an American music critic living and working in the US, and he makes it quite clear from the start that he intends to address a certain imbalance in music criticism which he feels has previously overlooked the contribution of American composers and institutions to classical music. Sadly, his well-meaning attempt to defend the validity of 'pop' music towards the end of the book (which could be summed up as, "If you listen hard enough, some of it even sounds like *our* music!") ends up only reaffirming the snobbery and elitism it seeks to combat. I finished the book feeling rather discouraged from exploring contemporary classical music further.
My feelings towards 'The Rest Is Noise' were probably heavily influenced by the book I read prior to it, which happened to be Theodor Adorno's book on Alban Berg - a detailed, complex, poetic and ultimately deeply moving tome which in the end is as much a dialogue between two close friends as it is a piece of music criticism. Ross' book is a completely different beast entirely; perhaps part of my disappointment was a result of unfair comparison.
But at most, only part.
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Read this book over a number of sessions. The first half I thought was super - the second half was hard work. Reviewing the releationship between music and politcal and cultural events between 1900 and 1945 was fascinating - Shostakovich's relationship with Stalin possibly the best chapter in the book.
Post 1950, the book becomes much less interesting. The modernist/minimalist movements are less interesting (as is the music) and the book seems to jump from the 1960s to the end of the Millenium a bit too quickly.
Intended or not there is also too obvious a USA bias in the writing the history of the century. Post 1950 far too much attention is given to US composers and too much from Western Europe seems trivialised. The author seems to struggle writing his musical history of the century without making the USA more central than it should be to the history (usual Old World New World stuff).
For me very much a book of 2 halves. 1900-1950 chapters were excellently presented, fluent, thought provoking and with a good pace. In contrast I found the second half of the book a bit laboured, 20 years of history arguably missed out, too much focus on New York City and US composers - and links to the pop and rock genre overstated.
Also find it bizarre that the BBC Proms - the world's biggest music event that spans the century - doesnt event get a mention.
The result - an interest read but would certainly not see it as the best reference book on the subject
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Over the last few weeks I have been reading this book. There it's been, sitting in my living room. People have dropped by, sat down, picked it up, opened it at random, and started reading. It only took a couple of paragraphs to get them hooked. Really, I can't think of a better recommendation for a book.
It doesn't matter if you like 20th century classical music or not, Alex Ross writes in a way that just makes you want to go on reading. This book is a treasure trove, one fascinating detail after another, recounted in intelligent, witty, excellently written prose.
Alex Ross that essential gift for a book like this. He goes beyond description, and actually fleshes out his story with his words: the people, the places, the politics, the music.
This is an American eyed view of 20th Century Classical music. Indeed, to a great extent it is a New York eyed view. This doesn't bother me too much as a British reader. So much of 20th Century history passed through New York; or in the case of many European composers, decamped to the city. They left their European homes and found new ones in the various New York neighbourhoods which had become outposts of their native lands. New York is literally a world city. A city where pretty much everywhere in the world has at least a block or two to call home.
Politics looms large here. Of Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, McCarthy's post war USA and onwards. It is amazing that Classical music survived as living music at all. After the external impositions on the music from political regimes, came the internal impositions of the totalitarian regime of the ultra modernists under their pitiless generals Boulez and Stockhausen.
Thank goodness for the lighter parts of the century as well. Alex Ross makes a good fist of doing that difficult job - bringing the story to some sort of conclusion. This is always a problem with recent histories in any field, especially in music. Time brings its own verdicts: which music has lasting significance etc etc. The recent past is always riot of confusion: what will prove to have substance and be long lasting? Here we are presented with a selection of the great figures in the decades leading up to the 20th century's end. Messiaen and the Minimalists loom large, as they should.
As far as a British view eye of music is concerned there is one weakness, and one wrong observation. The weakness is that Benjamin Britten is presented as being the only important British 20th Century composer. The wrong observation is on the luck of the British in having so much of their 20th Century music played in their concert halls, in contrast to the situation in the USA. Firstly, except for Benjamin Britten, most of the 20th Century British music in our concert halls is from the early part of the century, Elgar, Vaughan Williams etc. Secondly, I took a look at what is being played in New York, and contemporary music isn't doing so badly.
I won't judge Alex Ross too harshly for that, or for having to make choices about which musical figures he was going to highlight. These choices have to be made. He gives us an entertaining and thought provoking cast including: Strauss, Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, Gershwin, Sibelius, Schostakovich, Copland, Richard Strauss, Britten, Boulez, Cage, Messiaen, Ligeti, Glass, Reich and Adams.
So, buy this book and get stuck in. It's the kind of book that's hard to put down.
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