Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #500 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-03
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

Sunday Times
'Warm, joyful and unfailingly adroit in his evocation of music in words.'

Spectator
'A remarkable achievement, quite outstripping comparable surveys...A highly enjoyable book of impressive scholarship...that every music lover should read.'

Observer
'[A] vital, engaging, happily polyphonic book.'

Customer Reviews

BARELY LISTENING
Made possible by the exacting editors at The New Yorker, where most of it appeared first, this once-over-very-lightly survey of 20th century Western music begins with the first stirrings of modernity in Bayreuth and Paris circa 1880 and takes us up to now, when new classical work is largely consigned to movie soundtracks.

The real story since 1950 is the discovery of so much forgotten classical past, and the careful efforts to recreate its original sound in recordings. We experience classical music today through the composers brought back to roaring life by musicologists and audio engineers, not the dry postwar modernisms shunned by the public. At home, I now have more beautiful music ready to play than any pre-war musician would have heard in a lifetime. Halfway through the century, the medium itself changed profoundly, from an ephemeral public one to an archival private one. This story Mr. Ross does not tell at all.

What would make his survey really useful is an annotated bibliography for each chapter, showing us where to get the information barely sketched here, along with a discography longer than one page. Ross' survey is very readable; it's just that you're on your own if you want anything more. But I do envy Ross for getting two paychecks for the same work, from his magazine and from his publisher.

An exciting tour of a musical century still ill-understood
For anyone at all interested in music from the twilight of Romanticism until the present this is a must read. Ross's compendious knowledge and mastery of his material makes this book both compulsive and a pleasure. Choosing to anchor the century in a performance of Strauss's Salome in Graz in 1906, the author introduces not only the key composers of the time - Strauss, Mahler and Schoenberg - but hovering the distance, the young Adolf Hitler. (Whether Hitler really did attend is not known - but Ross's point may be that in some sense he is there in spirit - or the new Germany is gestating in the womb of the old.)

On the evolution of the Second Viennese School and early Stravinsky Ross is dependable and unfailingly insightful.

I think the only difficulty I had with his book came later in the story, amidst the ruins of Europe post the Second World War. As Strauss was bowing out of life with the painfully beautiful Metamorphosen and Four Last Songs a new, vicious cold wind was blowing with young Turks such as Boulez, Cage and Stockhausen leading the way. Here discrimination and judgment seem to have been set aside and in their place is a purely factual description of just what happened. No positive harm in that but I think there was scope for Ross to go further and, just for once in the book, to come off the fence. While he comments pointedly on Boulez's commitment to "violence and more violence" he might just have suggested that the sheer unlistenability of integral serialist works such as Boulez's Structures and Stockhausen's early piano pieces will forever condemn them in the eyes of many music lovers. And the condescending attitude towards the listener shown by nearly all influenced by Darmstadt was a continuing curse in twentieth century music until very recently.

I also believe that, despite its length (at over 500 pages), Ross might have said more about Tavener, Gorecki and Part. It is simply not sufficient to attach these composers to the American minimalists as a sort of footnote. Their inspiration and sheer beauty of sound set them apart. Tavener's total rejection of the Western music dynamic - consonance and dissonance - which is at the heart of classicism also deserves closer examination. And that can be usefully contrasted with other contemporary religiously inspired composers who thrive on Beethovenian contrasts and struggle (I'd put James MacMillan - who Ross doesn't mention - in this category.)

But, to conclude, much to savour and contemplate in this marvellous book. But, without becoming polemical, I suspect some personal judgement from Ross about the lasting value (or not) of each of the many streams of the "delta" (as Cage called it) of 20th Western music would have been the icing on the cake.

A 'must read'.
One of the most complete and satisfying books of its genre. It is easy to read, and draws you through the Music and Musicians of the 20th century. The only problem is the expense, for one is always making notes as to which CD to order next!!