A must for all Pop Culture junkies.‘Myriad weird and weirder showbiz stories with which to amaze, astound and possibly bore rigid close personal friends down the pub or in sheltered accomodation. A must for intellectuals and anoraks alike.’ Mark RadcliffeDid you know that those aren’t Julia Roberts’ legs on the ‘Pretty Woman’ poster? In fact the only things that are Julia’s are the head and the incandescent smile. Everything from the neck down b ...
Alex Ross’s sweeping history of twentieth-century classical music, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, is a gripping account of a musical revolution.The landscape of twentieth-century classical music is a wild one: this was a period in which music fragmented into apparently divergent strands, each influenced by its own composers, performers and musical innovations. In this comprehensive tour, Alex Ross, music critic for the ‘New Yorker’, ex ...
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.Profiling Debussy and Schoenberg, two of the century’s earliest innovators, Ross traces the development of atonality, and with it the reinvention of Western harmonic tradition.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at Londo ...
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.Against the background of the carnage and upheaval of WWI, Europe saw the violent birth of a new musical avant-garde. Ross examines the search for novelty and authenticity by Stravinsky, Ravel, Bartok and Janacek.Now a major fest ...
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.After 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. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ...
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.Jean Sibelius hailed from the ‘small nation’ of Finland. Working in isolation, far from the great artistic capitals of Europe, Ross shows how Sibelius’s reinvention of classical forms went on to set the pace for classical compose ...
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.Benjamin Britten lived for most of his life around the Suffolk coast, and is buried in the Aldeburgh churchyard. He once stated that all his music came from there. ‘Peter Grimes’ is an opera of staggering force that is soaked in ...
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.After the war, composers took up what might be called catastrophe style with a vengeance. The twentieth century was undoubtedly one of the most horrific periods of human history – but terror was not always the subject of its comp ...
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.Following the Allied victory, all over Europe, young people were emerging from the rubble into adulthood – amongst them, leading figures of the post-war musical scene. They would be indelibly marked by their teenage experiences, ...
