My favourite chapters: - Chapter 7: The Art of Fear. Music under Stalin's Dictatorship. - Chapter 9: Death Fugue. Music under Hitler's rule. - Chapter 10: Zero Hour. With context, I find that I can appreciate 20th century music a little much better now. I've come to observe how its characteristic...
The BEST book on contemporary music history. So entertaining and alive, so interesting and challenging. Being a composer myself, I have always had a kind of love-hate relationship towards a lot of contemporary classical music. I love many of the ideas of Stockhausen, Boulez and others, but don't ...
Music critic (The New Yorker) Alex Ross is a perceptive and articulate writer, his style perfectly attuned to what one would expect in that magazine. This present volume is a collection of his essays and addresses a wide variety of topics. Ross is usually adroit at weaving observations about mu...
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a voyage into the labyrinth of modern music, which remains an obscure world for most people. While paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pa...
The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let her appear at Constitution Hall, Washington’s largest concert venue, because of the color of her skin. In response, Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, resigned from the DAR, and President Roosevelt gave permission for a concert on the Ma...