Customer Reviews
Where, oh where are the women? 
2008-06-22
What ever happened to composers who were/are women in the 20th century? Like the reviewer with whom I agree that Ralph Vaughan Williams music is sorely underated, so I believe the music of women is also. What about those brave ladies who, without much encouragement did it anyway? That includes Cecile Chaminade, Lili Boulanger, Libby Larsen, Miriam Gideon, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Thea Musgrave, Alma Mahler, Margaret Bonds, Louise Viardot, Amy Beach (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach), and scores of others whose names are not represented? I do feel this book has much good information, but am able to give it only three stars, due to the omissions.
Content seems good. Audio format is lacking 
2008-06-03
I started reading the hardcover version, then decided to get the audio version. While the actual content seems quite engaging, the volume of the MP3 files is way too low. Upping the volume on my mp3 player introduces so much background hiss it's distracting (and I need not push the volume up for other content I listen, be it speech or music).
Very disappointing.
content, amazing. physical book, not so much... 2008-06-01
i/m on page 260, by which time i/ve learned quite a lot i didn/t know abt some music (which is odd), and have ordered or downloaded quite a few cds. my only complaint is that the binding of the book has now broken *twice*. i haven/t been carrying it around or dropping it or anything, it just *breaks*. if you don/t need the info, wait for the paperback. no one else even *wants* to read your superglued copy of a book.
content - 5. book - as low as it goes.
The Pedantic Mister Alex Ross 
2008-06-01
I've decided to give this book four stars for a number of reasons, including its highly informative content, its ability to transform and inspire the reader to become a musicologist in the model of the author, and its ability to make obscure, avant-garde pieces of music actually stand out with true color. Despite these positive assessments, I wish to briefly underline why I'm not giving this book five stars. For one, Alex Ross, the author, comes across as a rather pedantic, elitist individual: not only does he fail to translate any quotes given in French, Spanish, Italian, etc. (thus losing the efficacy and relevancy of the quote and his point) but he also uses a language which automatically assumes that all of his readers have advanced through the same music theory training as him. Personally, the more than frequent moments in the book where Mr Ross expounds a piece of music by discussing its structure in terms of glissandos, ostinatos, and major sevenths means very little to me - and I even tried learning about these separate articles via Wikipedia and other supplementary websites to no avail. It really requires a special university level course to understand the relevancy of these topics as Mr Ross discusses them. In short, he has written a book for the high-brow, high-profile crowd which normally reads the New Yorker, the publication which he has served at for over 12 years now.
It's not a horrible book. I just wish I would have known that I should've purchased The Complete Idiot's Guide to Music Theory before reading it!
Left-wing Politics Vitiates Anything Positive in this Book 2008-05-09
First, I don't consider Mr. Ross's narrative and insights to be particularly compelling. He has a fairly shallow vision of classical music . Second, and more important, his unrelenting liberal political views intrude ubiquitously into his story of 20th century music. His focus on Germany is standard left-wing claptrap. Can't liberals ever give Germans and Nazis a rest. They were bad, really bad and probably lots of Germans still are. But in the 21st century, it's time to move on...which won't occur for people like Mr. Ross who are virtually blind to anything wrong on the left. Also, the book meanders and it's selection of composers to write on is arbitrary---the Sibelius section is inexusable. Finally, he's a socialist and a true believer in big government as big daddy for us all. This book is perhaps the most overrated book in many a year.
Good Quality, Timely Delivery 2008-07-18
I am happy with the quality of the book I recieved and also the timely manner in which it arrived.
tunes. or not. 
2008-07-18
This a wonderful book. It presents a spiky topic with clarity, sincerity and humor. Never once did I get the feeling that the author was a critic writing just for other critics or a historian writing for the ages. I recommend this book to anyone who feels intimidated or baffled by 20th century classical music. It probably won't change your ambivalence toward a lot of this music, but it will give your curiosity a leg up.
True Adventure 2008-07-02
The music of the twentieth century remains an almost undiscovered but volatile treasure. Too often the only classical music people are aware of are works composed in the long bourgeois century - the 1800's - and earlier. But it is only in the twentieth century when music comes face to face with itself in a confrontation that sparks revolution and counter-revolution all at once.
I hope that Alex Ross' book "The Rest Is Noise" can stir many readers into setting out on a true adventure : the discovery of Schoenberg and all of the other major composers of that fractious period. It is a true adventure because listening to this music puts the soul on the chopping block. There are perils here as well as riches that will haunt one.
It's all about the connections 2008-07-02
Alex Ross' chronicle of Western music in the 20th century is just about as far from most histories of music as can be imagined. In most conventional histories composers and their work break into discrete, hermetically sealed capsules of time and place. One could easily believe that the great composers of Western art music worked in artistic isolation, creating their masterpieces without contact with each other or their surroundings. Of course an occasional friendship or student/teacher relationship might have existed and even been important, but that's about all.
Ross from the outset is determined to shatter walls and establish connections, opening with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss strolling together the night of the premiere of the latter's scandalous opera, Salome, an event at which Schoenberg, Puccini and maybe even Adolf Hitler were present. This sets the tone for the entire book, which sweeps past hitherto familiar events in music history, such as the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, while shining fresh beams of revelation on them. The core of "The Rest is Noise" consists of three chapters that examine music in three nations during particularly shattering periods of upheaval: Stalin's Russia, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal America, and Hitler's Germany. Each centers around a major composer, Shostakovich, Copland and Strauss respectively, examining these artists and the frequently tortuous relationships they had with their contemporary governments and politics in minute detail. I plan to read and re-read these and other chapters, as it is almost impossible to digest all of the information presented at one sitting. It will be easy to do so, since Ross has a knack for finding arresting images and anecdotes that stick in the reader's mind: Schoenberg and Stravinsky knocking about in Beverly Hills, thinking about writing film music; Pierre Boulez railing against his former friend John Cage; and perhaps loopiest of all, the quintessential serialist Milton Babbitt trying his hand at writing a Broadway musical.
It would be beyond the grasp of any author to treat everything he or she examines with equal depth and skill, and not all of Ross's writing is revelatory. His glance at Debussy, for example, produces no new insights, and while I may be prejudiced, I don't think Jan Sibelius merits the loving, detailed chapter he gets, as enthralling as the actual writing may be. Nevertheless, I don't recall another book about music, and I've read many, that brought both music and the people who created it to such vivid, immediate life. This one will stay on a shelf where I can easily reach it for a long time to come.
the rest is a bit overblown 2008-06-25
Famously (well, sort of famously, in small, self-regarding circles), Barnett Newman once claimed that 'our argument [is] with Michaelangelo'. Almost equally famously, Robert Hughes, standing in front of Newman's 'Stations of the Cross' retorted to camera 'Sorry, Barney, you lost'. The attitude was clearly in the air, because Ross quotes John Cage as saying, at around the same time, that 'Beethoven was wrong'. He even uses the phrase as a chapter title, but I can't imagine him following up with Hughes' putdown.
The problem is that, in the end, Ross takes the stuff he writes about too seriously. But, lets face it, 'classical' music, post Schoenberg and Stravinsky, has, for the most part, withered from a world historical, into a niche activity. The most it has aspired to, the most it probably can aspire to, at least when not chasing after the bourgoisie with a chain-saw, is intelligent prettiness, but this is not something that Ross is willing to admit, and without that basic perspective, the whole thing is a bit overblown.
There are good bits: Ross's response to Webern's piano variations is almost word-for-word identical to mine, but even then, on the whole, I find his critical idiom bombastic, esp given the status of the material, and I do think that a general culling of darlings should have been enforced, if necessary, by a friendly editor: sentences like 'In twentieth century music, through all the darkness, guilt, misery, and oblivion, the rain of beauty never ended' do not make my day better.
One curious thing I noted is how so many of the composers who feature are painted in negative terms, as either politically naive (Copland, etc.), nasty (Boulez - Ross does not like Boulez, and who can blame him) or plain evil, Webern. Adrien Leverkühn is invoked a lot. I wasn't sure what to make of this.
Another curious thing is that there are no transciptions of actual music: Ross does everything with joined up writing. It seems that actual music in a popular book about music is today about as welcome as actual written down equations in a popular book about physics. For some reason, I find this slightly dispiriting.
Finally, I should declare a personal connection to all this stuff: John Cage changed my life. The ultimate cause of my meeting and marrying my wife was a Cage concert (in Saarbrucken, where I lived at the time, which was a very ambitious sort of place: one memorable year, the local opera house - a gift from Adolf Hitler personally - had Wozzeck, Lulu and a magnificent production of Moses and Aaron, all in one season). The Cage concert was memorable fun, but it did did nothing more than confirm Cage's location in the pantheon somewhere below Vivaldi. I don't mean that negatively, but relative to Beethoven? Sorry John, you lost.
