
The Rest Is Noise
Listening to the 20th Century
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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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Alex Ross
About this listen
Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism. In addition, he was named a 2008 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, given for achievements in creativity and potential for making important future cultural contributions.
©2007 Alex Ross (P)2007 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
Like the origins of a musical idea waiting to be developed through the course of symphony, Adrian Leverkühn, the titular musical genius of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, foreshadows The Rest is Noise. Mann has Leverkühn attend a performance of Richard Strauss' Salome in 1906, the same event that opens The Rest is Noise. Alex Ross lists Leverkühn's fictional attendance along with that of the historically correct presence of Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg, the cream of doomed European society - and the 17-year-old Adolf Hitler. in Mann's book, Leverkühn contracts syphilis around the same time from a prostitute who goes on to haunt his work; the implied germination of something dark and destructive - musically and historically - sets the tone for Ross' hugely ambitious book.
if writing about music is like dancing about architecture, Alex Ross, the classical music critic of the New Yorker, is Nureyev with a notebook. Critics may quibble with the lack of academic theory in his descriptions of music (in this regard, it's constructive to compare his book with Charles Rosen's The Classical Style), but he has an undeniable gift for enabling the reader to 'hear' the outline of the music he describes (or at least make them believe that is what they're hearing): "Strings whip up dust clouds around manic dancing feet. Brass play secular chorales, as if seated on the dented steps of a tilting little church...Drums bang the drunken lust of young men at the center of the crowd." Consequently, there are countless moments in this book where the temptation to download the music is overwhelming - clearly, copyright issues and running time barred inclusion of musical segments in this recording, and it's a tribute to Ross' style that this omission isn't a critical blow.
The author's forte - obsession, even - is to conjure up sweeping historical vistas and then focus in on the tiny details that bring biographies to life: Charles ives' stint as an insurance salesman, the discovery by Alban Berg's brother of the teddy bear as a marketable toy. Ross also likes to draw historical parallels between the careers of very different composers. However, comparisons with works outside the genre don't always convince of their relevance, for example Sibelius' 5th with John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Everyone from Britten to Björk, Ellington to Einsturzende Neubauten is invoked, which is fun but can feel arbitrary. At these points, the listener is reminded of the author's other career as a prolific blogger - blog writing seems to invite a certain loftiness of authorial position from which vantage point sweeping generalisations are made; The Rest is Noise can occasionally fall into this trap. -Dafydd Phillips
Critic reviews
- National Book Critics Circle Award, Criticism, 2007
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Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother took him and his older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend much of his childhood hungry, without running water, in deep poverty. It was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed.
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Absolutely incredible, memoir of the year
- By Susie Bright on 10-16-23
By: Werner Herzog, and others
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The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles
- How Music Has Shaped Civilization
- By: Howard Goodall
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multilayered orchestration can seem bewilderingly complex. In his dynamic tour through forty thousand years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation—harmony, notation, sung theater, the orchestra, dance music, recording—strikes us with its original force.
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Great intro to musc history
- By Enthusiast on 03-06-16
By: Howard Goodall
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Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion
- By: Bill Messenger, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Bill Messenger
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Original Recording
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Jazz is a uniquely American art form, one of America's great contributions to not only musical culture, but world culture, with each generation of musicians applying new levels of creativity that take the music in unexpected directions that defy definition, category, and stagnation. Now you can learn the basics and history of this intoxicating genre in an eight-lecture series that is as free-flowing and original as the art form itself.
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A Disappointingly Distorted, Myopic View Of Jazz
- By Parallax View on 08-18-13
By: Bill Messenger, and others
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Major Labels
- A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres
- By: Kelefa Sanneh
- Narrated by: Kelefa Sanneh
- Length: 18 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music - as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities.
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Humbling
- By Greg Adamson on 11-20-21
By: Kelefa Sanneh
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Musicophilia
- Tales of Music and the Brain
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does - humans are a musical species.
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The Best Of Sacks...
- By Douglas on 11-23-12
By: Oliver Sacks
If you could sum up The Rest Is Noise in three words, what would they be?
How fusty old composers overcame life's vicissitudes to produce meaning in sound -- Alex Ross's prose makes his critical ear accessible to me. Walking in the park, listening to his words, I could almost hear the tension of the notes that made the first listeners uneasy.He Writes What He Cares About and So I Care
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B-O-R-I-N-G!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Ross is a wonderful writer who employs rich descriptive language and a nice balance between facts and occasional humorous antidotes. The narrator does a fine job of endeavoring to bring the text to life without letting too much unnecessary drama get in the way. It's a large book, and he moves it along at a good pace.
As already indicated by several other reviewers, this book is not for everyone. It would be particularly relevant to the serious music enthusiast, students and music educators, and arts historians. Recommended.
Excellent for serious music enthusiasts
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Solid and Fun Listening
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I had half a mind to forego reading the rest of it. Boy am I glad I didn't. I'll be frank, I don't have a particular driving interest in the classical music of the 20th century and even after reading the book, while I am better informed, I have not suddenly become a fan of the genre. It was worth it to read this book just to hear Ross string words together. This guy can write. I kept reading just to find out what chain of words he was going to use next. He's that good.
This is the kind of guy you would quote without attribution at a dinner party to set yourself apart as the most erudite person in the room. I'd give anything to be able to write like this. Ross has a 10th degree black belt in the English language; that's the bottom line.
One note I'd like to add as a point of critique about the format. This audio book would be so much better served if excerpts from the pieces of music being described could be inserted at the proper points. I get that this probably isn't possible with the licencing of some of the music, but it would certainly bring the audio book full circle. It would be the entire package. For all that Ross is a master of using English to describe music, when he tells me that Charlie Parker "scribbled lightning in the air," I like the sound of the words. But what does that sound like in music? This book is great, set it to music and it would be a masterpiece.
I'd Read Ross Even He Just Wrote Warning Labels
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It seems weird to me that many so called straight line composers such as Beethoven or Liszt were thought of as “way out there” in their time, but even weirder to think that someday people will look at a lot of this incomprehensible (to me) music and wonder why we couldn’t see the beauty of it and love it. So the world goes.
I have bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music and even at that, this book was hard to keep up with. If you don’t have some pretty good understanding of music and music history, don’t waste your time. It will bury you.
It’s a lot to take in.
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Disconnected series of factoids
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The best book I've "read" on the subject
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Great, entertaining and very informative
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What did you love best about The Rest Is Noise?
A superb combination of history, biography and musical analysisWhat was one of the most memorable moments of The Rest Is Noise?
The extent to which the US government, in Germany after WW II, used music to shape the culture away from Aryan extremism.Which character – as performed by Grover Gardner – was your favorite?
No characters, a nice piece of non-fiction. He's got a great, and well measured voice. Really appreciated it.If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
Not sure one would be made but how about Jazzing up the Repertory.Any additional comments?
If you've got half an ear for classical music and haven't caught on to modernism (which is almost 100 years old now) this is the book for you. You'll refer back to it many times.Excellent in all respects
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