Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book WorldBest Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture.…
"It’s an account of 20th century classical music, which can be quite a hard sell, but Alex Ross entwines it with the social history of the century, because that really is how the music makes sense. He does it quite brilliantly: it’s instantly been hailed as a classic. No one else has done a book on the 20th century with such colour and brilliance; this is a total tour de force. It whisks us through the various big events and big figures and also small figures like West Coast radical, mad polytonal composers like Harry Partch, who one would never know about – he weaves it into a really convincing narrative that makes total sense. All my friends who’ve picked it up who don’t know anything about music have suddenly understood 20th century music, and it is an amazing thing to have done something like that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter At times it reads like a novel almost: it’s got a real narrative thread. And there are lots of brilliant details that you would never otherwise get – personal accounts that Ross has taken from various figures. There’s a great portrait of Messiaen, who wrote this incredibly strange music: always glorifying God, but in the most seamy, slinky way. A very odd combination of sex and God, but Messiaen himself was completely without any dark side, and the description of this is so well drawn. Ross asks Nagano, a conductor who used to work very closely with Messiaen, for some dirt really, trying to find out where all this sex comes from. But the only story Nagano comes up with is an anecdote in which he remembers Messiaen and his wife devouring an entire pear tart at one sitting. That’s the worst he can uncover."
"I also want to get through “The Rest Is Noise,” by Alex Ross, and listen to all the music he suggests (this is also taking me years)."
