The Rest is Noise

Resumen del libro

Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2008 A sweeping musical history that goes from the salons of pre-war Vienna to Velvet Underground shows in the sixties.

In The Rest is Noise', Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, gives us a riveting tour of the wild landscape of twentieth-century classical music: portraits of individuals, cultures, and nations reveal the predicament of the composer in a noisy, chaotic century. Taking as his starting point a production of Richard Strauss's Salome, conducted by the composer on 16 May 1906 with Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg and Adolf Hitler seated in the stalls, Ross suggests how this evening can be considered the century's musical watershed rather than the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring seven years later. Ross goes on to explore the mythology of modernism, Sibelius and the music of small countries, Kurt Weill, the music of the Third Reich, Britten, Boulez and the post-war avant-garde, and interactions between minimalist composers and rock bands in the sixties and seventies.

Biografía del autor

ALEX ROSS nació en Washington D. C. Desde 1996 es crítico musical del New Yorker. Ha sido galardonado con numerosos premios, como tres ASCAP Deems Taylor Award por su crítica musical, la Genius Fellowship de la MacArthur Foundation, la Holtzbrinck Fellowship de la American Academy en Berlín, la Fleck Fellowship del Banff Centre y una Letter of Distinction del American Music Center por su contribución al campo de la música contemporánea. Ha sido profesor de escritura en la Universidad de Princeton y ha recibido un doctorado honorífico de la Manhattan School of Music. Actualmente vive en Manhattan. Su primer libro, el best seller internacional El ruido eterno (Seix Barral, 2009), fue galardonado con el National Book Critics Circle Award, el Guardian Book Award, el Premio del Pen Club Musical Japonés al mejor libro del año y la Genius Fellowship, y fue finalista del Premio Pulitzer 2008 y del Premio Samuel Johnson.