Here you can listen to brief excerpts of some of the works discussed in The Rest Is Noise. There are also embedded videos, images, and links to archives, stories, and sound files 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 a sound-enhanced glossary and here for a 20th-century playlist.
NOTE: If you are using an iPad, an iPhone, or another device that doesn't use flash, use these pages instead.
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
