In the twentieth century, music ceased to be one thing. It became a congregation of distinct musical cultures, speaking all at once in mutually alien tongues. 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, with portraits of individuals, cultures and nations that reveal the predicament of the individual composer in a century of noise.

Taking as its starting point a May 1906 performance of Richard Strauss's ultra-decadent opera Salome, with the composer himself conducting and Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg and (rumour has it) Adolf Hitler seated in the stalls, Ross explains how this one evening can be considered the century's true musical watershed, rather than the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring seven years later.

Preface

PART Ⅰ: 1900-1933

1. The Golden Age: Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siecle

2. Doctor Faust: Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality

3. Dance of the Earth: The Rite, the Folk, le Jazz

4. Invisible Men: American Composers from lves to Ellington

5. Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius

6. City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties

PART Ⅱ: 1931-1949

7. The Art of Fear: Music in Stalin's Russia

8. Music for All: Music in FDR's America

9. Death Fugue: Music in Hitler's Germany

10. Zero Hour: The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945-1949

11. Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties

12. "Grimes! Grimes!": The Passion of Benjamin Britten

13. Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties

14. Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists

15. Sunken Cathedrals: Music at Century's End

Epilogue

Notes

Suggested Listening

Acknowledgments

Index