Alex Ross: "The Rest is Noise"

I'm working my way through Alex Ross' "The Rest Is Noise". This book (published last year) is what I have been looking for: an intelligent and readable account of 20th century 'serious' music.

Ross is a music critic for The New Yorker, and the great thing about this book for those of us who know more about rock music than classical, is that Alex Ross in a sense is one of 'our' guys too- he's not one of those classical music writers who are completely distant alien beings who know nothing about the world of serious popular music. Looking through his blog, I notice that Ross has also written fine articles about artists such as Kurt Cobain and Pavement, and his playlists include works by Portishead, Björk, Sonic Youth, Antony & The Johnsons, Justin Timberlake, Bob Dylan, Radiohead etc etc. So basically he's a great guide into this alien world for an old rock listener like me. And he's a damn fine writer too.

The book starts out covering some of those gateway composers that helped usher in 20th century music, particularly Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler and Maurice Ravel. Then it moves onto the music of the 1920s and 1930s - Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, Bartok, Janacek, Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Kurt Weill and the Berlin scene, and then moves through the decades until it arrives at later giants like Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Olivier Messiaen, Benjamin Britten, Gyorgy Ligeti, Steve Reich, Philip Glass etc etc. It also touches briefly on The Beatles and The Velvet Underground and a few other rock groups that were influenced by (and influenced) the classical avantgarde.