Although I only ended up blogging about the superhero panel at this year's New Yorker Festival, my favorite events from that weekend might actually have been the two sessions with the magazine's classical music critic, Alex Ross—one in which he interviewed (in)famous opera producer Peter Sellars, and the other an 80-minute multimedia tour through Ross's new history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest Is Noise. I've been a big fan of this book ever since I got my hands on the ARC, and my only objection had been, of course, that you can't really listen to the various composers as you read along with Ross's insightful commentary. The lecture helped a lot in that regard, but of course he can't give that talk to everybody... On the other hand, with some cooperation from music publishers and record labels, he can provide an online sampling of the major compositions covered in the book, and an iTunes playlist.

In a way, this goes back to what I was saying last month about providing incentives for hardcover buyers. The solutions Ross has come up with to promote his book online are great as far as they go, but in my fantasy publishing world, The Rest Is Noise would have been packaged with a CD, or a special code allowing hardcover buyers to download a discounted (or free!) playlist from iTunes or eMusic. Or—and here I admit I'm just daydreaming—a DVD documentary... Well, in the meantime, here's a three-minute trailer where Ross talks a little bit about the book's broad themes: