The Rest Is Noise – Listening to the 20th Century.

 The Rest Is Noise – Listening to the 20th Century by Alex Ross.

My good friend Marky Mark lent me this book and I have not given it back. To double down on my bad behaviour I must own up to something. I did not finish this book, not even close. I got about 20% through and then, well then I just put it down. It’s not that it is a bad book, quite the contrary. It is a very scholarly, well written book by an expert on the topic. If it has a fault, it’s that there is a presumption of a level of achieved knowledge on the topic that I don’t have.

You combine that with no great interest in the topic and that is when in my opinion, non-fiction comes to a grinding halt for any reader. If you don’t care about the topic at least a little, then with a factual book it is hard to keep going. To me it is a different read than a novel where even if the story does not grab you there can be other elements that keep you reading.

That said I am still going to review the book because I am sure you want to know what it is about, and I reckon I can certainly give you enough information for you to decide on your own your level of interest. Plus, at the moment I don’t have another book to tell you about and Marky Mark, a man of vast musical knowledge and generosity deserves some form of recompense.

So, from the title you might expect the book to be about rock and roll and/or the evolution of music linked to slavery, and the intersection of that music with music that evolved from the white settlement and growth of what we now know as the USA. It is not, or it is but only in a peripheral way. It is about what I would call classical or symphonic music in the 20th century, its evolution and splitting into numerous and bewildering sub genres like ambient music and show tunes. If you appreciate the music of Mahler, Sibelius, Strauss, Britten, Shostakovich, Copeland, Bernstein, Glass etc then this is the book for you.

There is a deep analysis of their lives, output, listener response and how they were affected by the times and places that they lived.

It is dense stuff and if you only have a passing interest in the above you will struggle as I did. It doesn’t help that the book is 696 pages long and the typesetting is very tight, so every page seems chockers with detail.

The author Alex Ross has been the music critic at The New Yorker since 1996 so I presume he knows his crescendos from his clarinets and this book is, I think, intended to be his grand statement. One thing for sure, he gives it his everything and I imagine it is the definitive work on the subject.

If you love the subject and the music, you can let the detail wash over you like a Mahler symphony. If you are like me, you might find The Rest Is Noise is the book equivalent of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a work of the 19thcentury to be accurate, and one when performed in its entirety takes 15 hours.  Just way, way too much.

The Rest Is Noise – Listening to the 20th Century

Alex Ross

696 pages

Picador 2007