Alex Ross
The Rest Is Noise: Listening
to the Twentieth Century.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 640 pages, $30
Alex Ross’s book is about one fifth or quarter music
analysis, which is good and proper, coming from The New
Yorker’s astute music critic. For the rest, we get much
that
is historical, biographical, anecdotal, philosophical,
and, to a modest extent, aesthetically evaluative. The
writing is of literary quality, not all that frequent in
books about music. Ross, moreover, is a genuine polymath,
and adduces a good deal of nonmusical history, social
observation, parallels to the other arts, and discussions of
popular music, which, as he argues, has a very porous border
with modern classical music. Nevertheless, the claim of the
jacket blurb that this is “not so much a history of
twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth
century through its music” and, as Ross himself affirms,
“the twentieth century heard through its music” is a trifle
grandiose. We learn much, for instance, about Hitler’s and
Stalin’s involvement with music and composers, whether
positive or destructive. But that isn’t quite like getting
the full roles of these dictators in shaping modern history.
Still, there is much useful cultural history.
For me, the first major distinction of the book is the
elegant, witty, often even poetic style. This allows Ross to
convey through imagery and aphorism much that cannot be
expressed otherwise. Consider:
At the height of [be]bop,
electric strings of notes lashed around like downed