The Rest Is Noise
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. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
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2016–2023years
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What Hacker News says
- "There is plenty of good music left to be written in C major." - Schoenberg
I got that from Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, an accessible history of 20th century composition. I went in ready to dislike Schoenberg but I walked away pretty charmed with him. I don't enjoy listening to any of his serial pieces, but I loved the twinkly little notes that play in Zelda BOTW when you're riding your horse. I don't claim that there's a _direct_ line from 12 tone rows to that, but overall I like living in the post-Schoenberg world where I hear a lot of the "intrepid elements of atonality, pointillist riffs" that the Atlantic author points to.
- All great books. I'd throw in "The Singer of Tales" by Albert Lord, which can really shift your thinking about how oral traditions work. For pure music, I'd highly recommend "The Rest is Noise", by Alex Ross.
- If you are interested in classical music - here's a couple of good books on the 20th century.
The first is just music, the second one covers art and culture in general but has a lot about music."The Rest Is Noise" by Alex Ross "Modern Times, Modern Places" by Peter Conrad"America's Musical Life: A History" by Richard Crawford is also great, focusing on America obviously and covers more than just the 20th century.
- I expect that this article's title will give some Hacker News readers an incorrect impression of what it's about.
As the article mentions, this talk was given at the Donaueschingen Festival, so the audience almost certainly consisted mostly of fans of avant-garde contemporary classical music. If the author only mentions jazz or rock, or electronics only in passing, it's because he's primarily talking about the future of contemporary classical music, and in particular the future of the sort of highly-experimental classical music played at the Donaueschingen Festival, and probably not the future of music at large.
In this context, I think his question is a reasonable one. What will/should innovative classical music look like in the future? The article's suggestion seems to be that it should focus less on being radically experimental, and more on innovating in a way which is more deeply rooted in traditional techniques and more easily comprehensible to the listener. I suppose the question is, in light of what is now a long history of extreme musical experimentation, what does innovation look like in this more traditional context? I obviously don't have any answers, but I agree with the author that it would be nice to see more focus in this in the experimental classical music culture.
As an aside, this article has a lot of references to composers and pieces which will make it tough reading for someone not already familiar with avant-garde classical. That said, it does give a nice whirlwind overview of a lot of historical trends in this space, so if you're unfamiliar, but still sufficiently interested, you might use it as a quick reference for areas to listen to. Alex Ross' book "The Rest is Noise" is a good resource for a deeper look at the area.
- Even in his day, Rachmaninoff was derided as being behind the times, stuck in the 19th century. I can't help thinking the hatred is similar to the singing purists exalting Domingo and trashing Pavarotti.
In fact, Domingo IS a "better" singer and does sing to your heart and not just your head, but Pavarotti is the one who communicates with ordinary people. There is nothing wrong with that.
Alex Ross (The Rest is Noise) is a champion of modern, dissonant-sounding music, and he knows his music theory backwards and forwards. So he's someone people would expect to despise the Rach-man. Knowing that, I don't see this article as condescending.
