It won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Royal Philharmonic Society Creative Communication Award appeared on the New York Times's list of the ten best books of year and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the Samuel Johnson prizes. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was published in 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and became a national bestseller. From 1992 to 1996 he wrote for the New York Times. See this thread for more information.Īlex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome dance with politics, social and cultural change.Īlex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction. Even the most jaded veteran of twentieth century music must have been startled by the influence of the post-war avant-garde on the psychedelic generation. For a split second during ‘Revolution 9’ the final chords of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony can be heard. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Īfter Paul McCartney listened to the electronic layering and looping of Stockhausen, the Beatles used the same effects on Revolver’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and put an image of the composer on Sgt. This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’.

The rest is noise book