The Rest Is Noise

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year
Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007

Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007
A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007

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 First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Preface
Where to Listen

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 Ives to Ellington
5. Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius
6. City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties

PART II: 1933-1945
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

PART III: 1945-2000
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 and Reading
Acknowledgements
Index