Book Audiofiles and Links

Here you can listen to brief excerpts to some of the works discussed in The Rest Is Noise. There are also links to archives and stories elsewhere on the Internet. Many of the sound samples on these pages are permitted under an ASCAP Internet broadcast license. Special thanks to various publishers and record labels who gave me permission to use their material. Go here for my 20th-century iTunes playlist.

PART I: 1900-1933

1.  THE GOLDEN AGE: Mahler, Strauss, and the Fin de Siècle

2.  DOCTOR FAUST: Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality

3.  DANCE OF THE EARTH: The Rite, the Folk, le Jazz

4.  INVISIBLE MEN: American Composers from Ives to Ellington

5.  APPARITION FROM THE WOODS: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius

6.  CITY OF NETS: Berlin in the Twenties

PART II: 1933-1945

7.  THE ART OF FEAR: Music in Stalin’s Russia

8.  MUSIC FOR ALL: Music in FDR’s America

9.  DEATH FUGUE: Music in Hitler’s Germany

PART III: 1945-2000

10.  ZERO HOUR: The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945-1949

11.  BRAVE NEW WORLD: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties

12.  “GRIMES! GRIMES!”: The Passion of Benjamin Britten

13. ZION PARK: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties

14.  BEETHOVEN WAS WRONG: Bebop, Rock, and the Minimalists

15.  SUNKEN CATHEDRALS: Music at Century’s End