This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.The years before WWI were a golden age for German and Austrian classical music. The story of this period – and a way of life soon to end – is told through the intertwined careers of the two titans of early twentieth-century compo ...
This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.Ross shows how the flowering of avant-garde music in early twentieth-century Russia was co-opted, corrupted and crushed by the dictatorial ideology of Stalin’s Russia, with great composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev forced to choose between collaboration, exile or ostracism.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 ...
This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.How can composition in the twentieth century be summarised? Styles of every description – minimalism, post-minimalism, electronic music, laptop music, Internet music, appropriations of rock, pop and hip-hop, experimental folklori ...
This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.With some of Europe’s greatest composers fleeing persecution under Stalin and Hitler, the USA in the 1940s became a place of refuge and of fresh creativity, both native and immigrant. At the same time, a newly democratic spirit meant that what had once been the preserve of the elite increasingly came within reach of the masses. ...
This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Tracing the development of the American avant-garde, Ross examines the crucial influence of African-American musicians on the classical establishment, the dawn of the Jazz age, and the forging of a new and uniquely American class ...
This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.Hitler loved and was obsessed by classical music. This is the chilling story of the manipulation of some of German music’s greatest composers and cultural icons, and the persecution of others, all in the name of the Nazi’s deathly cause.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an ...
This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.The newly-created democratic state of Weimar Germany was, famously, a crucible for progressive art of all kinds, and classical music was no different. From Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera to Schoenberg’s development of the influential twelve-tone technique, Ross charts this flowering of avant-garde creativity.Now a major fe ...
This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.The Cold War breaks out and music explodes into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances,and party splits. The language of modern music is reinvented. This short ebook looks at some of the e ...
A behind-the-scenes, in-depth look at the making of one of the greatest sonic masterpieces and most commercially successful albums of all time.Over three decades after its release, Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ remains one of the most acclaimed albums of all time. Its sales total around 30 million copies worldwide. In its first run, it took up residence in the US charts for a mind-boggling 724 weeks. According to recent estimates, one ...
