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Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
A great read, recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in music This is a huge subject, and Alex Ross does a great job of covering it. Not everyone will be happy if their pet composer or movement has been tackled only briefly (if at all), but it would be impossible to fit the entire century into a single volume. As a result of reading this I have been moved to listen to Schoenberg and Strauss (esp. the Metamorphosen) for the first time; they are challenging works but rewarding and it has been great to have my musical horizons expanded by reading this book.
For me,... more info
Musical and historic, magic v
A communal review for the Cote d'Azure Men's book group of The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross Written for the book group by Sidney Freedman and Barry Hibbitt Music, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the art of combining sound, voices and instruments to achieve beauty, an expression of emotion. Shakespeare's said it more succinctly in Twelfth Night: "if music be the food of love play on."
Many people listen to it for pleasure, whether it be the might of a major... more info
unlikely to help you with that cd storage problem... Given that whole books could be written about virtually every single composer Alex Ross mentions in this mammoth survey, you'd be forgiven for thinking that 'The Rest is Noise' would be heavy on filler and light on critical insight. Whilst it's fair to say that as the musical world diversifies post-1950, Ross spends less and less time looking at the work of individual composers - this should take nothing away from an astounding work of scholarship. Like any critic, Ross clearly has his own tastes and... more info
BARELY LISTENING Made possible by the exacting editors at The New Yorker, where most of it appeared first, this once-over-very-lightly survey of 20th century Western music begins with the first stirrings of modernity in Bayreuth and Paris circa 1880 and takes us up to now, when new classical work is largely consigned to movie soundtracks. The real story since 1950 is the discovery of so much forgotten classical past, and the careful efforts to recreate its original sound in recordings. We experience classical music... more info
