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the rest is noise listening to the twentieth century
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
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List Price: $18.00
Our Price: $12.24
Your Save: $ 5.76 ( 32% )
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 780
EAN: 9780312427719
ISBN: 0312427719
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 704
Publication Date: 2008-10-14
Publisher: Picador
Release Date: 2008-10-14
Studio: Picador
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Editorial Reviews:
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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 World Best 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. Â
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: All the rest is noise
Comment: I love Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, even Mahler. But anything beyond that, well, to me it has been just noise. However, Alex Ross's book has helped me to listen in a different way. It takes a long time to work through this book because when Ross talks about this or that composer, this or that piece, I have to stop and find the music (usually at my public library) and listen several times to get what Ross is saying, and then I can listen with more insight (insound?). The historical background is fascinating. The political control in music (e.g., Stalin's effect on Russian composers)is an important part of this book. The subtitle highlights Ross's emphasis on how music tells us something about history. I now understand better the physics of sound and the physical effect that music has on the listener. Ross has a list of recommended recordings which I turn to from time to time. I still do not get Messiaen! This books points the reader in many new directions, opens the reader to other options. It's a great read!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Lo demás es música
Comment: Alex Ross ha escrito un libro informativo y ameno.
Para los aficionados a la música, en especial la del siglo XX, es un libro perfecto, que recorre la historia y las claves más importantes de esta expresión contemporánea.
Además, el autor tiene una página en internet donde se puede expandir esta agradable experiencia.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not what I was expecting
Comment: I was expecting a book that would explain more about 20th century [classical] *music*, but instead this book is mainly biography mixed with a bit of history. If you don't already have a strong background in music theory you will be lost; even if you have a strong background in pre-20th century music you will not learn much about 20th century music here. The book was a big disappointment in that respect.
The snippet from the Amazon.com review sums it up: "The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo...[t]he movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone...." If you don't know what "Scherzo", "fourths", or "tritones" are, this book will not explain them to you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A tough mountain to climb
Comment: I'm learning a lot about 20th-century music from The Rest is Noise, but it's a tough read. The book is clearly well researched, however, in an effort to cite sources, the author disrupts the narrative flow. Consider the following sentence:
"Strauss sketched a choral work based on Goethe's text, and, as Jackson discovered, some of that material went into Metamorphosen."
"Jackson" here is Timothy Jackson, a researcher mentioned in an earlier paragraph. Inline citations like this are peppered throughout the book, making it very difficult to focus on the story at hand. I think it would have been better if these citations were in the form of endnotes.
The book takes a detached, scholarly tone throughout. Nonetheless, it is a very informative and thorough review of 20th century classical music, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A review of 20th Century music for the tutored and untutored
Comment: I found this book immensely edifying. I have no musical training but have an eclectic interest in music. This book is written in a very readable manner without reducing its scholarly value. I found in it some things I did know and much with which I was unfamiliar. It has led me to listen to music of some 20th century composers with whom I was less familiar or not at all familiar. I would highly recommend this work for all persons, scholared or unscholared, who have an interest in the history, present, and future of the classical music genre.
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