The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century - Softcover

‘It’s a history of 20th-century music so vivid and original in approach that it made me listen again to many pieces I thought I knew well.’ Philip Pullman, Guardian (Books of the Year)

‘Ranks as my non-fiction book of the year. Erudite and engaging, written with flair and passion.’ Boyd Tonkin Independent (Books of the Year)

‘Combines scrupulous and inventive analyses of the 20th century’s music with lavish care over that music’s improvised history.’ Adam Thirwell, Guardian (Books of the Year)

‘Magisterial.’ Telegraph (Books of the Year)

‘He places the music in social and cultural context while sticking to the score and eschewing the artworld political consensus. A miracle.’ George Walden, TLS (Books of the Year)

‘The Rest is Noise achieves the aim with bravura, hacking out a path leading from cacophonous European modernism to the white noise of The Velvet Underground.’ Ludovic Hunter-Tilroy, Financial Times (Books of the Year)

‘Alex Ross breaks new ground. This is an astonishing book.’ Bob Stanley, The Times (Books of the Year)

‘Expansive and artful survey of modern music.’ The London Paper (Books of the Year)

'Just occasionally someone writes a book you've waited your life to read. Alex Ross's enthralling history of 20th-century music is, for me, one of those books.' Alan Rusbridger, Guardian

‘Alex Ross's incredibly nourishing book will rekindle anyone's fire for music.’ Björk

‘Stunning narrative. Visionary music critic Alex Ross comes closer than anyone to describing the spellbinding sensations music provokes.’ Financial Times

‘A work of immense scope and ambition ... a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand 'more seeingly' in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.’ New York Times

'The book achieves a remarkable interdisciplinary synthesis, in which music illuminates history as well as vice versa ... Ross has delivered a sound-drenched masterpiece.' Steven Poole, Guardian

Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2008

A sweeping musical history that goes from the salons of pre-war Vienna to Velvet Underground shows in the sixties.

In ‘The Rest is Noise’, Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, gives us a riveting tour of the wild landscape of twentieth-century classical music: portraits of individuals, cultures, and nations reveal the predicament of the composer in a noisy, chaotic century. Taking as his starting point a production of Richard Strauss's Salome, conducted by the composer on 16 May 1906 with Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg and Adolf Hitler seated in the stalls, Ross suggests how this evening can be considered the century's musical watershed rather than the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring seven years later. Ross goes on to explore the mythology of modernism, Sibelius and the music of small countries, Kurt Weill, the music of the Third Reich, Britten, Boulez and the post-war avant-garde, and interactions between minimalist composers and rock bands in the sixties and seventies.