Автор: Alex Ross

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.After Paul McCartney listened to the electronic layering and looping of Stockhausen, the Beatles used the same effects on Revolver’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and put an image of the composer on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. For a split second during ‘Revolution 9’ the final chords of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony can be heard. Even the most jaded…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Jean Sibelius hailed from the ‘small nation’ of Finland. Working in isolation, far from the great artistic capitals of Europe, Ross shows how Sibelius’s reinvention of classical forms went on to set the pace for classical composers around the world.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Benjamin Britten lived for most of his life around the Suffolk coast, and is buried in the Aldeburgh churchyard. He once stated that all his music came from there. ‘Peter Grimes’ is an opera of staggering force that is soaked in Aldeburgh to its bones.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary…

Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2008.A sweeping musical history that goes from the salons of pre-war Vienna to Velvet Underground shows in the sixties.In ‘The Rest is Noise’, Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, gives us a riveting tour of the wild landscape of twentieth-century classical music: portraits of individuals, cultures, and nations reveal the predicament of the composer in a noisy, chaotic century. Taking as his starting point a production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, conducted by the composer on 16 May 1906 with Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg and Adolf Hitler…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Profiling Debussy and Schoenberg, two of the century’s earliest innovators, Ross traces the development of atonality, and with it the reinvention of Western harmonic tradition.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Against the background of the carnage and upheaval of WWI, Europe saw the violent birth of a new musical avant-garde. Ross examines the search for novelty and authenticity by Stravinsky, Ravel, Bartok and Janacek.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the…

In Listen to This, the award-winning music critic and author of The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross looks forward and backward in musical culture: capturing essential figures in classical music history, as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music.From his own first encounter with classical music to vibrant sketches of Schubert, Verdi and Brahms; from in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead to the lives of a high school’s music students, Ross shows how music can express the full complexity of human experience. He explains how pop music can achieve the…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.The Cold War breaks out and music explodes into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances,and party splits. The language of modern music is reinvented. This short ebook looks at some of the extraordinary compositions of this period.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate…

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.Hitler loved and was obsessed by classical music. This is the chilling story of the manipulation of some of German music’s greatest composers and cultural icons, and the persecution of others, all in the name of the Nazi’s deathly cause.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome dance with politics, social and cultural…

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.The newly-created democratic state of Weimar Germany was, famously, a crucible for progressive art of all kinds, and classical music was no different. From Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera to Schoenberg’s development of the influential twelve-tone technique, Ross charts this flowering of avant-garde creativity.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Tracing the development of the American avant-garde, Ross examines the crucial influence of African-American musicians on the classical establishment, the dawn of the Jazz age, and the forging of a new and uniquely American classical idiom.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the…

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.With some of Europe’s greatest composers fleeing persecution under Stalin and Hitler, the USA in the 1940s became a place of refuge and of fresh creativity, both native and immigrant. At the same time, a newly democratic spirit meant that what had once been the preserve of the elite increasingly came within reach of the masses.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that…

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.Ross shows how the flowering of avant-garde music in early twentieth-century Russia was co-opted, corrupted and crushed by the dictatorial ideology of Stalin’s Russia, with great composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev forced to choose between collaboration, exile or ostracism.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.How can composition in the twentieth century be summarised? Styles of every description – minimalism, post-minimalism, electronic music, laptop music, Internet music, appropriations of rock, pop and hip-hop, experimental folkloristic music in Latin America, the Far East, Africa and the Middle East – jostle against each other, none gaining supremacy. ‘The Rest is…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.The years before WWI were a golden age for German and Austrian classical music. The story of this period – and a way of life soon to end – is told through the intertwined careers of the two titans of early twentieth-century composing, Strauss and Mahler.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Following the Allied victory, all over Europe, young people were emerging from the rubble into adulthood – amongst them, leading figures of the post-war musical scene. They would be indelibly marked by their teenage experiences, their memories colouring their compositions.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.After the war, composers took up what might be called catastrophe style with a vengeance. The twentieth century was undoubtedly one of the most horrific periods of human history – but terror was not always the subject of its composers. For some, attempting to transcend or reject the despair that consumed other artists led to the creation of some of the century’s most…