The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
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The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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SOME idea of what is going on
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This book gave me at least SOME idea of what 20th century and early 21st century classical music is about, and that is exactly what I wanted. I was slow to like modern classical but it gradually grew on me, over the last 20 years. I grew to like the passionate edginess and reality that atonality brings out. Alex Ross does of good job of explaining how we got here through the ambient cultures, politics, wars, dictators, and time itself. Surprisingly, to me at least, atonality began about a hundred years ago with the 12-tone music of Arnold Shoenberg. But since then we've gone through minimalism, though Philip Glass and others are still there, and we are now in something called post-minimalism that John Adams and others are into. Tonality, I understand from the book, is even making a comeback. On the other end of the spectrum, there is experimental classical music that combines any popular or extant ethnic or national genre and can be enhanced by improvisation, electronics, creative time-shifted track layering, basically anything you can think of. If we were in the '60's, we would call it "far-out!". I'm still trying to adjust to atonality so I probably won't go there myself.
Ross is an eloquent and efficient writer. I was almost awed by how much he knows, but he makes himself accessible enough (though his interspersed brief technical explanations were beyond me). I'll never be an expert in music, but I'm a little better off for having read his book.
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The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century Books In Print, Audio Books.