Ross — The Rest Is Noise

Author: Alex Ross
Title: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Year: 2007
Type: Book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a history of twentieth-century classical music by Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s music critic from 1996 to 2026, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007. Ross has summed the book up in two words, “Composers matter,” and its title plays on Hamlet’s last words. It tells the century in three parts and fifteen chapters, from Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler to the end of the century, with a middle part that sets music in Stalin’s Russia, FDR’s America and Hitler’s Germany side by side. Ross writes that it gives equal time to the “progressive” and “conservative” camps. Its subject, in Ross’s words, is “the volatile, ever-changing relationship between composers and the society around them,” and he wrote it for specialists and newcomers alike. It was widely praised: it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and the Guardian First Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the New York Times named it one of the ten best books of 2007. Alan Rusbridger, in the Guardian, called it a book he had waited his life to read, and Geoff Dyer, in the New York Times Book Review, called it “a great achievement.”

The New Yorker hired Ross full time in 1996, and he served as its music critic for thirty years, stepping down from the column in July 2026 to remain a staff writer.^{1, 2} He published the book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007. On its website he writes that if he could reduce it to two words they would be “Composers matter.” The title, he explains, plays on Hamlet’s last words, “The rest is silence,” and on “the widespread perception that classical composition devolved into noise as the twentieth century went on.” “What may sound like noise on first hearing,” he writes, “may reveal hidden beauty if you give it a second chance.” He wrote it, he says, with two audiences in mind, readers who know the music and readers new to it.²

The book opens on Strauss conducting Salome in Graz on May 16, 1906, with Giacomo Puccini, Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg and six of his pupils in the audience, along with “young people from Vienna, with only the vocal score as hand luggage.” Ross suggests that the seventeen-year-old Adolf Hitler may have been among those young Viennese: “Hitler later told Strauss’s son and daughter-in-law that he had borrowed money from relatives to make the trip.”³ The book’s three parts, in fifteen chapters, cover 1900 to 1933, 1933 to 1945 and 1945 to 2000. Its middle part has chapters on music in Stalin’s Russia, FDR’s America and Hitler’s Germany, and its other chapters include “Invisible Men: American Composers from Ives to Ellington,” “Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius,” a chapter on Benjamin Britten and “Beethoven Was Wrong: Bebop, Rock, and the Minimalists.”⁴ Ross writes that the book “gives equal time to the so-called ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ camps” and “seeks out common ground between them,” noticing, for example, that “Morton Feldman loved the seemingly retrograde Jean Sibelius.” He gives the book’s principal theme as “music’s relationship with surrounding historical events.”² The book’s website carries an audio guide on which readers can hear hundreds of samples.²

The book was widely praised. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 2007 and the Guardian First Book Award in 2008, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and the Samuel Johnson Prize. The New York Times named it one of the ten best books of 2007, and Kirkus gave it a starred review, calling it “a benchmark book.”⁵ Alan Rusbridger wrote in the Guardian, “Just occasionally someone writes a book you’ve waited your life to read.” Geoff Dyer, in the cover review of the New York Times Book Review, called it “a work of immense scope and ambition” and “a great achievement.”⁵

Key contributions

• Twentieth-century classical music told against the century’s politics, with music in Stalin’s Russia, FDR’s America and Hitler’s Germany side by side.
• Equal time for the century’s so-called progressive and conservative composers, and the common ground between them.
• A history written for specialists and newcomers alike, with an online audio guide of hundreds of musical samples.

See also

• Classical Music in America — Joseph Horowitz’s 2005 history of classical music in the United States
• Oxford History of Western Music — Richard Taruskin’s multivolume history of Western music, published in 2005