Twentieth-Century Music

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century 

by Alex Ross

“Bernstein poured his unfulfilled ambition into stupefying powerful performances of the Mahler symphonies, freighting them with the themes that he should or would have addressed in his own music if only he had the time or the energy or whatever it was that he ultimately lacked:"







This is an immersive introduction to twentieth-century music. Ross explains musical and cultural in novel-like prose that is often mesmerizing. The intimate activities of composers and their interaction with the world around them come alive in this amazing book.

Reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross's outstanding essay on Schoenberg, Mahler, Strauss, or even Philip Glass will make anyone who has ever tried their hardest but failed to fully comprehend, appreciate, or even grasp their complex works smile. The Rest Is Noise. Not only does Ross manage to give historical, biographical, and social context to 20th-century pieces both major and minor, he brings the scores alive in language that's accessible and dramatic.

Consider Ross's portrayal of Schoenberg's Second Quartet: "He finds himself at a crossroads, pondering the different paths that are unfolding before him." Written the year before, the first movement retains a fairly traditional late-Romantic language. In contrast, the second movement is a Scherzo that sounds hallucinogenic and is unlike any other music of the era. It includes excerpts from the folk ballad "Ach, du lieber Augustin," which Mahler associated with Freud. Schoenberg saw the song as a representation of a world gone by collapsing, with the line "Alles ist hin" being crucial. A terrifying series of four-note figures, consisting of fourths divided by a tritone, culminates the movement. Traces of the bifurcated scale that starts Salome can be seen in them. Nevertheless, the feeling of tonalities colliding has vanished. As an alternative, a matrix of intervals is replacing the idea of a chord altogether.

Most of The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross The 20th Century is worth listening to because it explores the music of the stormy decade and how it influenced political and cultural history. The book is approachable and has the power to simplify complicated musical subjects due to the author's readable style and use of personal experiences to illustrate the book's themes.