The Rest Is Noise. Listening to the Twentieth Century

The Rest Is Noise is a voyage into the labyrinth of modern
music, which remains for many people an obscure and forbidding world.
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
confronted 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.