Alex Ross Brings the Noise

There are blogs in my RSS feed that are about things besides books and the publishing industry, and one of my favorites is The Rest Is Noise, the home page of New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross. So when the folks at the 92nd St. Y told me they were inviting bloggers to Ross’s Sunday brunch lecture last weekend, I was all set. Of course, the event was ultimately book-related, or I wouldn’t be mentioning it here; when Ross brought along his boom box to discuss some of the innovations in Debussy and Schoenberg’s compositions, he was previewing a chapter from his forthcoming book, also called The Rest Is Noise, which FSG will publish this fall. “What I want to do is to provide an intelligent introduction to this fabulous, labyrinthine world: not just the music itself, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky onward, but the entire cultural and social tumult around it,” Ross told the 92Y blog before the event “It’s not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century told through music.”

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