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The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.

Article Excerpt
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. By Alex Ross. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. [xiv, 624 p. ISBN-13: 978-0-374-24939-7. $30.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, discography, index.

Music librarians have a treasure in this wonderful new book: unlocking the treasure chest itself is best accomplished by reading the index first. That way, names you might want to see in the text but that do not appear there will not surprise you. The index provides a detailed overview of just who and what are discussed in the book. Next, read the preface. That is where Alex Ross reveals his purpose: "Each chapter cuts a wide swath through a given period, but there is no attempt to be comprehensive: certain careers stand in for certain scenes, certain key pieces stand in for entire careers, and much great music is left on the cutting-room floor" (p. xiv). Ross emphasizes in his preface that the "chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written; the intellectuals who attempted to adjudicate style; the writers, painters, dancers and filmmakers who provided companionship on lonely roads of exploration; the audiences who variously reveled in, reviled, or ignored what composers were doing, the technologies that changed how music was made and heard; and the revolutions, hot and cold wars, waves of emigration, and deeper social transformations that reshaped the landscape in which composers worked" (p. xii-xiii). After reading the book itself, the reader may want to read the endnotes to find out just where all of these bits of information came from, and to see how artfully Ross has woven them into his text.

Ross freely admits that "portions of the book originally appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker." He also states that his subtitle is meant literally: "this is the twentieth century heard through its music" (p. xiii). He informs the reader that the book is the result of fifteen years of work as a music critic. He also occasionally reiterates the purpose of the book as the text unfolds, as, for example, when he writes that the book illuminates "the cultural predicament of the composer in the twentieth century"...

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