The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century Decide Now

If I could give this 10 stars and designate it for the desert, I would.

I can. I do.

I have a LOT of 20th century music, and have read my fair share about 20th century music and musicians, so the subject isn't wholly terra incognita. But Ross pulls together a host of interesting stories, weaves them into coherent chapters and plausible narratives, gives popular music - ragtime, jazz, rock 'n' roll, pop - a measure of credit (while refusing to discriminate between Ellington, than the (Mr. Jelly) Lord, and his "classical" contemporaries...although failing to give Ellington doppleganger Billy Strayhorn his own due), is careful to define influences, "advances," "retreats," and generally refrains from judging until the last chapter. Ross pulls much of eclectic listening over the past 50 years into sharper focus, telling, for example, the familiar stories of Mahler and Shostakovich movingly and of the appalling Richard Strauss fairly unsparingly, making the Velvet Underground pivotal in a few more dimensions than I had earlier understood, telling the sad story of the migrating movie composers of the 1930s and 1940swho changed the history of cinema, how Showboat and Gershwin and Oklahoma created the American Musical, relating tales of Reich, Glass and the other American minimalists in a compelling, coherent (probably TOO coherent) way, and on and on. And as one reviewer noted, he makes you want to hear every note he's discussed. I've already spent a small pile picking up a lot of music I was either insufficiently familiar with or wanted to hear in different performances than the ones I grew up with.

The great unanswered question, however, is a rather philistine one, but I'll put it into Philip Glass's mouth, which uttered these words: the European avant-garde of the 1950s-1960s was "a wasteland, dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy creepy music." How so much "crazy creepy music" - which most listeners, not all, would simply call "noise" and what "sound scientists" would term "physiologically difficult to listen to" - got written, and how its composers dominated the "serious composition" narrative of the time, how strange conceptual American "scores" could be written - here's one from proto-minimalist La Monte Young, in its entirety: "Piano Piece for David Tudor # 3: Most of them were very old grasshoppers." (I know: this is deep, but too deep for an this review platform) - and commented on by serious, intelligent humans and not simply hooted off the stage (I dunno, may La Monte Young WAS hooted off the stage...but "conceptual composers" like John Cage weren't)...is a mystery beyond all ken.

This is absolutely indispensable reading for anyone who cares about the past, present, and future of music. I overuse the word "magisterial" to describe things I really, really love, the meaty, beaty, big, and bouncy stuff that really gets me going, but if ever a book on my shelf deserved the term, it's The Rest is Noise. M A G I S T E R I A L . My God, what a pleasure. (And when's my big Stravinsky box coming?)
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