The Rest is Noise, Ross

“The Rest is Noise is a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand ‘more seeingly’ in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.” — Geoff Dyer, The New York Times Book Review

In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music — from Vienna before the Great War to Paris in the 1920s, from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to downtown New York in the 1960s to present day. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century’s most influential composers and wider culture. The Rest is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) won a National Book Award Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His essay collection Listen to This was published in 2010. His third book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, was published in 2020. Ross has received the George Peabody Medal, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Author: Alex Ross
Format: Paperback, 720 pages
Publisher: Picador (2008)
ISBN: 9780312427719