08 October, 2009

Book: The Rest is Noise

Book: The Rest is Noise - Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

Author's own description of the book
Official Page Publisher MacMillan (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux)
Praise from The Guardian
Praise from the New York Times Book Review

Alex Ross is currently classical music critic for The New Yorker. For those not acquainted with this wonderful magazine, it's highly geared towards the arts, and has always had top writers on their staff. Ross' illustrious predecessors include the famous classical music critic Andrew Porter (referred to by Norman Lebrecht here) .

Taking advantage of the internet's audiovisual ability, author Ross has created on his Blog an AUDIO GUIDE to his book. It's quite entertaining and can stand on it's own. Some of the musical examples are quite familiar to me, but I also learnt a lot of new things. It shall take you quite a while to finish, but the effort shall be amply rewarded. Highly recommended.

Incidentally, the book is available from the library. And if you don't know the man with the gramophone, he's Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's masterpiece Fitzcarraldo, one of my desert island films. And if you don't know this Kinski you may want to recall his ravishingly beautiful daughter, the actress Natasha Kinski (photos), the one on the CD cover of the Paris, Texas soundtrack.


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