A Playlist for Alex Ross’ ‘The Rest Is Noise’ - A History Of The Twentieth Century As Told In Music

‘The Rest Is Noise’ (TRIN) takes as its starting point an unorthodox musical chord – shockingly (at the time) dissonant and sensuous - presented by Richard Strauss in his opera ‘Salome’. When the opera was premiered in Dresden in 1905 it was an immediate “succès de scandale”, and it heralded the start of a century of extraordinary music and music making, when composers challenged traditional perceptions about how music should be written and performed, and questioned exactly how we define "music" and "concerts". All the established notions of the previous centuries were overturned in a century of continuous avant-garde which saw music come full circle from the atonality of Schoenberg and his contemporaries to the serialism and electronic music of Stockhausen to a return to melody and almost medieval polyphony in the music of Arvo Pärt.

TRIN is organised chronologically in three parts – 1900-1933, 1933-1945 and 1945-2000 – and into those parts it packs a huge amount of information, presented in an accessible and highly readable style. This is no dry academic survey of Twentieth-Century classical music, but an enthralling, sometimes breathtaking journey through a century of almost continuous flux. (The nearest other book to this on twentieth century culture is ‘The Shock of the New’ by the late art historian Robert Hughes, which is a good companion read to TRIN and is equally accessible in its approach and prose.) For many people classical music, and particularly twentieth-century and contemporary classical music, remains an obscure and intimidating subject, yet Ross’s engaging writing style, his vivid cast of maverick characters and breadth of coverage make this the ideal book for both the ingénue listener and seasoned music lover.

TRIN explores how and why twentieth-century composers felt the need to create a such a bewildering array of sounds, from the beautiful to the incomprehensibly discordant; how they resisted or rejected the pull of their classical antecedents, or paid homage to them in striking new works; struggled against the indifference of audiences and critics; and defied dictators such as Hitler and Stalin to create meaningful, experimental and highly personal music.

The narrative moves from Vienna prior to the First World War to Paris in 1920s and the Jazz Age, from the Europe of Hitler and Stalin to downtown New York in the 1960s and 70s. Through music, we witness the rise of mass culture, mass politics and mass communications, ground-breaking new technologies (many of which had a profound effect on how music is written and performed today), of experiments and revolutions, changing attitudes and newly-forged relationships, both musical and social.

This playlist is inspired by TRIN with tracks reflecting some of the most significant composers and compositions mentioned in the book. It aims to show the wide variety of music across the decades of the 20th century and demonstrates that not all "modern" music is atonal, abstract, challenging, esoteric or inaccessible. Many of the selected pieces are melodic, consonant and highly appealing and prove that composers still turn to traditional classical forms, instrumentation and orchestration in the creation of new music.

‘The Rest Is Noise’ by Alex Ross

Published 2007 by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (USA) and 4th Estate (UK), and translated into more than 10 languages