The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Alex Ross

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СКАЧАТЬ is Noise is a wonderful book, both as an account of 20th-century music and as something of a cautionary tale about the influence of politics on art’

      Scotland on Sunday

      ‘There is so much in it that is good, and so much of the discussion of particular works is likely to make any reader want to go off and listen to the music, 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

Dedication

      For my parents and Jonathan

Epigraph

      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

       Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

Where to Listen

Part I - 1900–1933

1. The Golden Age

2. Doctor Faust

3. Dance of the Earth

4. Invisible Men

5. Apparition from the Woods

       6. City of Nets

       Part II - 1933–1945

       7. The Art of Fear

       8. Music for All

       9. Death Fugue

       Part III - 1945–2000

       10. Zero Hour

       11. Brave New World

       12. “Grimes! Grimes!”

       13. Zion Park

       14. Beethoven Was Wrong

       15. Sunken Cathedrals

       Epilogue

       Keep Reading

       Suggested Listening and Reading

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

      About the Publisher

PREFACE

      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.

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