Alex Ross
Includes a new chapter on John Cage.
Alex Ross’s award-winning international best-seller, ‘The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century’, has become a contemporary classic, establishing him as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians; this is his much anticipated next book on the subject of music.
In ‘Listen To This’ Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker, looks both backwards and forwards in time, capturing essential figures and ideas in classical music history, as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music that emphasizes the power of the individual musical voice.
After relating his first encounter with classical music, Ross vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews wth modern pop masters such as Bjork and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and to indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. In his essay ‘Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues’, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history – from Renaissance dance to Led Zeppelin – through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament.
Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross writes in a style at once erudite and lively, showing how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. He explains how pop music can achieve the status of high art and how classical music can become a vital part of the wider contemporary culture. Witty, passionate and brimming with insight, ‘Listen to This’ teaches us to listen more closely.
Reviews of Listen to This
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- ‘Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues. This essay is Alex Ross’s own chaconne, one that only he could have written – a display of lateral thinking as virtuosic, in its own way. It alone is worth the price of the book, which I strongly encourage you to buy.’ Sunday Telegraph
- ‘One minute, you’re immersed in Mozart, and then suddenly you’re on tour with Radiohead and contemplating what it must have felt like for an unworldly Finnish conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, to take the reins of the LA Philharmonic. Reading the book is the literary equivalent of an iPod on shuffle; it offers fresh and unexpected stimulation at every turn.’ Guardian
- ‘The qualities that make him a top-notch critic become clearer in concentrated reading…Ross is an avowed buff. He loves music with a nerdish obsession and he wants you to love it as much as he does’ New Statesman
More from Alex Ross
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Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
Hardback -
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
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Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
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Listen to This
Hardback -
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Hardback -
The Rest Is Noise Series: Sunken Cathedrals: Music at Century’s End
Other -
The Rest Is Noise Series: Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties
Other -
The Rest Is Noise Series: “Grimes! Grimes!”: The Passion of Benjamin Britten
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The Rest Is Noise Series: Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties
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The Rest Is Noise Series: Zero Hour: The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945–1949
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The Rest Is Noise Series: Death Fugue: Music in Hitler’s Germany
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The Rest Is Noise Series: Music for All: Music in FDR’s America
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The Rest Is Noise Series: The Art of Fear: Music in Stalin’s Russia
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The Rest Is Noise Series: City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties
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The Rest Is Noise Series: Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius
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The Rest Is Noise Series: Invisible Men: American Composers from Ives to Ellington
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The Rest Is Noise Series: Dance of the Earth: The Rite, the Folk, le Jazz
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The Rest Is Noise Series: Doctor Faust: Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality
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The Rest Is Noise Series: The Golden Age: Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siecle
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Listen to This
Other -
Listen to This
Other -
The Rest is Noise
Ebook -
The Rest Is Noise Series: Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists
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The Rest is Noise
Paperback