num_pages: 640
description: 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 pages of alienated teenagers across the land, twentieth-century classical music still sends ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, its influence can be felt everywhere. Atonal chords crop up in jazz. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalism has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward.The Rest Is Noise shows why twentieth-century composers felt compelled to create a famously bewildering variety of sounds, from the purest beauty to the purest noise. It tells of a remarkable array of maverick personalities who resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with sweet sounds or battered them with dissonance, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art. The narrative goes 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. We follow the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. The end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.
language: English
title: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
titlecomplete: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
genres: Classical Music, History, Criticism, Biography, Reference, Music, Cultural, Unfinished, Nonfiction, Art
ratings_count: 14925
series: The Rest Is Noise
awards: awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: General Nonfiction, awardedAt: 1230796800000
name: Warwick Prize for Writing
category: Shortlist, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: Guardian First Book Award, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Criticism, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Marfield Prize (National Award for Arts Writing), awardedAt: 1230796800000
name: Cundill History Prize, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: Royal Philharmonic Society Award
category: Creative Communication
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux