I read a book: Alex Ross’s ‘The Rest Is Noise’
For readers, like me, interested in the weird world of twentieth-century classical music and looking to supplement a foggy, gap-filled understanding of it, this book, which was a well-reviewed “New York Times Editors’ Pick” kind of thing when it came out a few years ago, is a handy survey. It is not, as Ross claims introductorily, an expansive discussion of twentieth-century music in general. It’s a book about the likes of Stravinsky, Cage, Reich, and Glass, not John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
To a surprising extent, the story of twentieth-century music is the story of twentieth-century politics, and Ross proves to be an able historian. (If you’re dying to know which members of the Second Viennese School were Nazi sympathizers, this is the book for you.) But Ross really shines as a writer when he’s describing actual music. Such descriptions constitute about 25 percent of this book’s mass, I’d say, and most are beautifully done. They not only give the reader a strong whiff of each composition’s mood, but they also evince Ross’s deeply felt passion for his subject.
I wonder, though, what this book would look like if it came out, say, ten years from now, when digital publishing has had more time to mature. Because as effective as Ross is at capturing a few phrases of music in words, prose is no substitute for the real thing. As I read The Rest Is Noise, I was constantly typing the names of compositions into YouTube so I could hear the real stuff for myself. (To this end, Ross has compiled a separate listening guide on his website.) An audio-rich digital version of The Rest Is Noise, while likely obviating the need for some of Ross’s beautiful descriptive writing (and entailing a few annoying copyright headaches), would nevertheless make for a much better book.
