About this title: Ross, music critic for "The New Yorker," journeys from Vienna before the First World War to New York in the 1970s and 80s. The result is not so much a history of 20th-century music as it is a history of the 20th century through its music.
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Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Picador USA
Date Published: 2008-10-14
ISBN-13:9780312427719ISBN:0312427719
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780312427719. read more
"Alex Ross is one of the most intelligent music critics writing today. His critical essays in The New Yorker are "must" reading for professionals as well as music lovers. He has always made a specialty of contemporary music, and is open to the most radical and avant-garde movements. His writing style favors clarity and lucidity, and he conveys the impression that he knows what he's talking about."
"One's ignorance -- one being the hodge-podge listener of all musics obviously known and rarely rare -- that ignorance smacks right up against this book, which blends interesting tidbits of 'great man' biography and historical watersheds with the motivations mysterious and crass whereby putative genius stretches and recombines the old into the what's not been there before.
The incubation of novelty gets explained in terms both of audience reaction and insider musical techno-language. But even with a skilled and modestly-served-out technical language, a review of music fails real adequacy. Alex Ross's writing is superb. The nature of the musical art, though, is to be heard, and its basis is emotional, deeply so.
Without a way of speaking about it, most of us simply emote, or - if we're better, like Ross - translate the heard into the visual dimension of written metaphor. Music's a place for romantics - even those romantics who eschew 'Romantic'-period music and go for the rationally classical or for the modern in whatever guise - spare, raucous, jarring, weird, or only referentially reverential.
Twentieth Century 'serious' music, a hard-sell for this plebeian world craving what makes the lower two-thirds of the body twitch, nevertheless runs through - give the ear that chance - the very body it seems to want to distort. After the megadeath we're keenly aware of and whose breath seems to be stertorously sleeping one off in the valley just over the hill, our sound values begin to catch up. There's beauty in the 'un-'."
"I was at odds when I started reading this book. I felt that when I was in college attempting to become a musician, my interest in 20th century music was minimal. (note: NOT minimalist!) Over the past few years however, my thoughts and ideas on music and shifted more toward the artists represented in this book.
There is an excellent amount of history on composers and even actual pieces in this book. Alex Ross does an amazing job of connecting the dots for readers who do not have as extenseive a music background, but also provides enough new information to not make it a bore for trained musicians.
I think my favorite part of this book was detailing some of Richard Strauss' more stressful years as state composer to the Nazi party. Knowing that his complacency kept his family alive in such a horrific time period for the Jewish people was mind blowing.
I also really dug the more up-to-date parts on Minimalism and how certain genres of music Pop, Be-bop, Rap, Psychadellic all had influence on modern composition and vica-versa. (Phil Lesh studied under Luciano Berio!!!) Very enlightening!"
"A gigantic survey, with all the weaknesses of surveys: speed, superficiality, and the eventual creation of a vague hum in my head, as if I'd been listening to, rather than just reading about, all these works over the last two weeks, at high volume and through very large headphones. That having been said, the biggest compliment I can think to give Ross's book is that, two weeks ago, I knew nothing about classical music; now I know something and have the desire to learn and listen to much more. So, the book has transmitted its passion.
Also valuable: the image of art in the 20th century like a tree that has been trunk for a while and is now ready (due to outside forces, opportunities, restrictions) to launch into branches. It sounds cliched at this point, but it really is impossible to read this book and not have one's spatial metaphors for art readjusted. So now, there is no single highway to genius and creation, but a series of little worlds (I imagine little circles of clear water growing spots, then humps, then being overgrown with mold). Works for literature, maybe?"
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