[書] Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

《The Rest Is Noise》 ，這是英國倫敦皇家節日音樂廳2012-2013的主題音樂， 最開始我也覺得奇怪， 以前音樂廳每年都有紀念偉大作曲家的活動， 今年音樂廳著重通過演奏20世紀作曲家的音樂， 放一些20世紀電影， 一些討論活動回顧反思人類剛走過的20世紀

20世紀是一個什麽樣的世紀呢？

（想想明天再說）


轉載： The Rest Is Noise: Summary

"A work of immense scope and ambition.... a great achievement." — Geoff Dyer, New York Times Book Review

"Just occasionally someone writes a book you've waited your life to read. Alex Ross's enthralling history of 20th-century music is, for me, one of those books." — Alan Rusbridger, Guardian

"Incredibly nourishing." — Björk

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, the 2008 Guardian First Book Award, a 2010 Premio Napoli prize in foreign literature, the 2011 Grand Prix des Muses, and a Music Pen Club prize in Japan; finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction; shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; one of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2007; also on best-of-the-year lists in the Washington Post, the LA Times, New York, Time, The Economist, Slate, and Newsweek. A New York Times, LA Times, and Boston Globe bestseller; translated into fifteen languages; more than 250,000 copies sold around the world.

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.

Click here for fifteen pages of audio samples.

Click here for reviews and advance praise.

Click here for an iTunes playlist.

Click here for Frequently Asked Questions.

Click here for a Glossary of Terms.

I started working on the book in the year 2000. The title I chose for the project, The Rest Is Noise, played off Hamlet's last words ("The rest is silence") and, more widely, the perception that classical composition devolved into noise as the twentieth century went on. The book was published in October 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; the UK edition, by 4th Estate, appeared in March 2008; Picador issued a US paperback, with an expanded discography, in October 2008. Translations are available from Companhia das Letras (Brazil), Ambo / Anthos (Netherlands), Piper Verlag (Germany), Seix Barral (Spain), Bompiani (Italy), Actes Sud (France), Casa das Letras (Portugal), PIW (Poland), Argo (Czech Republic), Janis Roze (Latvia), Modan (Israel), Misuzu Shobo (Japan), and Book21 (South Korea), and are forthcoming from Algoritam (Croatia), Ast Publishing (Russia), Dost Kitabevi Yayinlari (Turkey), and Guangxi Normal University Press (China).

Table of Contents:

PART I: 1900-1933

1. THE GOLDEN AGE: Mahler, Strauss, and the Fin de Siècle

Excerpt

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

Excerpt (published in The New Yorker)

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: Bebop, Rock, and the Minimalists

15. SUNKEN CATHEDRALS: Music at Century's End

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/05/what_is_this.html