Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, the 2008 Guardian First Book Award, a 2010 Premio Napoli prize in foreign literature, the 2011 Grand Prix des Muses, and a Music Pen Club prize in Japan; finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction and for the Samuel Johnson Prize; one of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2007; also on best-of-the-year lists in the Washington Post, Amazon.com, the LA Times, New York, Time, The Economist, Slate, Newsweek, the Times of London, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times, and the Independent.
Profile: "The Best Listener in America," Doree Shafrir, New York Observer
Audio stories: WBUR's On Point, Amazon's The Wire, NPR's All Things Considered, WNYC's Mad About Music, the Leonard Lopate show, WFYI in Indianapolis.
Starred review, Publishers Weekly
"A benchmark book that should eventually become a classic history of the 20th century." — Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"The best book on what music is about — really about — that you or I will ever own." — Alan Rich, LA Weekly
"A work of immense scope and ambition.... a great achievement." — Geoff Dyer, New York Times Book Review (cover review)
"Just occasionally someone writes a book you've waited your life to read. Alex Ross's enthralling history of 20th-century music is, for me, one of those books." — Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian
"Ross is a supremely gifted writer who brings the political and technological richness of the world inside the magic circle of the concert hall, so that each illuminates the other." — Lev Grossman, Time
"The Rest is Noise grapples with the actual stuff of music as few other books have done." — Ian Bostridge, Times Literary Supplement
"By far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music." — Michael Kimmelman, New York Review of Books
"Warm, joyful and unfailingly adroit.... Best of all are the moments when Ross really strikes you dumb with wonder, moments when the author’s passion for the supreme significance of music raises his erudition to a new level." — Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times (UK)
“There seems always to have been a ‘crisis of modern music,’ but by some insane miracle one person finds the way out. The impossibility of it gives me hope. Fast-forwarding through so many music-makers’ creative highs and lows in the company of Alex Ross’s incredibly nourishing book will rekindle anyone’s fire for music.” — Björk
"The line in which Elvis Costello likens writing about music to 'dancing about architecture' is well worn, but it was buried forever this year by Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise. It's a book every music fan should own." — Metro UK
"Excellent." — Neil Tennant, Pet Shop Boys
"The best book in the world about the most boring subject ever." — Jessica Pressler, New York Daily Intel
"This is the best general study of a complex history too often claimed by academic specialists on the one hand and candid populists on the other.... an impressive, invigorating achievement." — Stephen Walsh, Washington Post
"What powers this amazingly ambitious book and endows it with authority are the author's expansive curiosity and refined openness of mind." — Jamie James, Los Angeles Times
"Music in the 20th century is littered with great tales — of scandal, revolution, intrigue, lust, greed, shattered dreams and vaunting ambition and they all give this book its extraordinary zest and fluency." — Stephen Pritchard, The Observer (UK)
"Insightful, compulsively readable." — Anthony Tommasini, chief music critic, New York Times
"Coolly magisterial.... [The Rest Is Noise] the story of 20th-century music in completely fresh and unblinkered ways." — Jeremy Eichler, Boston Globe
"Print is silent. Which is why the task of writing about music is so difficult. I should therefore probably explain that the noise you now ought to be hearing is the sound of my hands as they stop typing and start applauding this vital, engaging, happily polyphonic book." — Peter Conrad, The Observer (UK)
"In his stunning narrative ... the New Yorker’s visionary music critic Alex Ross comes closer than anyone to describing the spellbinding sensations music provokes.... The Rest is Noise spins out seamlessly and is a joy to read." — Blair Tindall, Financial Times
"A sprawling tour de force.... The book has the force and scope of a heroic symphony in its own right." — Fred Kaplan, Slate
"[Ross] has an almost uncanny gift for putting music into words. No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording." — The Economist
"Modern music has lacked its The Shock of the New. Now, in The Rest is Noise, it has one." — Ivan Hewett, The Daily Telegraph
"Amply perceptive, eloquent, persuasive, and remarkably informative." — John Simon, The New Criterion
"In The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross shows himself to be a surpassingly eloquent advocate for beauty, by any means necessary." — Terry Teachout, Commentary
"A highly enjoyable book of impressive scholarship and critical intelligence that every music lover should read." — Rupert Christiansen, The Spectator
"As absorbing as a novel, as researched and erudite as the most academic tome, argued with the force and strength of an incisive essayist and deep thinker." — Daniel Felsenfeld, Symphony
"A book that makes some sense of the most convoluted musical century of human history. Ross takes the extremes, the wild diversity and contradictions as manifest realities to be understood through their relationships, rather than antagonisms that must cancel each other out." — The Wire
"An utterly gripping account of the relationship between music and public life in the last century. The Rest Is Noise is a wonderful book, both as an account of 20th-century music and as something of a cautionary tale about the influence of politics on art." — Ian Burnside, The Scotsman
"The New Yorker’s supremely gifted critic tells the story of musical composition through the 20th century – and makes it sound brand new. Here is a writer who can link life and work without trivialising either. This history of modern sounds develops into an intimate history of modern souls as well." — Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
"...comprehensive, imaginatively wrought, insightfully informative and vastly entertaining..." — Jed Distler, The Gramophone
"Ross takes the extremes, the wild diversity and contradictions as manifest realities to be understood through their relationships, rather than antagonisms that must cancel each other out." — The Wire
"A brilliant, hugely enjoyable cultural history." — Susan Miron, Christian Science Monitor
"Alex Ross...carries on a great tradition of musical writers including Hector Berlioz, Claude Debussy, and George Bernard Shaw. Now, for the first time, Ross has turned his feuilletonist’s sensibility to a longer form, the book, and he’s made a terrific debut on the big stage... [The Rest Is Noise] tells a compelling, epic, and entirely human story." — Jan Swafford, The Wilson Quarterly
"Ross's achievement is all the more astounding because it makes music essential to the understanding of history beyond the history of the music itself. And what could matter more than that?" — Jonathan Rabb, Opera News
"A towering accomplishment — an essential book for anyone trying to understand and appreciate one of the most fertile and explosive centuries in the history of classical music." — Kyle MacMillan, Denver Post
"Ross brings his gift for authoritative enthusiasm to a whole century's worth of music.... The result is a massively erudite book that wears its learning lightly." — Adam Kirsch, New York Sun
"With perpetual grace and excitement, Ross reanimates music buried in history and super-obscure record stores, and allows us to feel just how contemporary it can be." — Kevin Berger, Salon
"Superb.... This elegant book imparts to the music itself — that airy and elusive vibration — what so many critics cannot: three dimensions." — James Marcus, Newsday
"...a narrative that embraces the contradictions that characterize so much about the century just past, both in life and in art." — Steve Hicken, The High Hat
"Perhaps the least combative and doctrinaire of American classical-music critics, The New Yorker's Alex Ross turns out to be a brilliant chronicler of the combative, often stiflingly doctrinaire 20th century."" — Gavin Borchert, Seattle Weekly
"In The Rest is Noise ... [Ross] does not simply catalog major figures and artistic highlights, but presents music as an exciting phenomenon vitally related to broader political and social developments.... [He] grasps music on a profound, composerlike level...." — Zachary Lewis, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"[Ross's] brave goal is nothing less than to bridge the gap between modern composers and listeners. In this task, he is almost phenomenally successful...." — Timothy Mangan, Orange County Register
"Early into The Rest Is Noise, I felt like I was reading a book I had been waiting for all my life." — Juliet Waters, C-Ville
"Sweeping yet compulsively readable...Lucid technical descriptions illuminate the densest of pieces without dulling their inherently thorny nature." — Hank Shteamer, Time Out New York
"Superb narrative history... magisterial... One could not hope for a better guide; [Ross's] knowledge of both music and the historical forces that shaped it is deep and nuanced...." — Sudip Bose, The American Scholar
"Insightfully original.... Dramatic, erudite, and culturally expansive." — Johanna Keller, Chamber Music
ADVANCE PRAISE
"The Rest Is Noise reads like a sprawling, intense novel, one of utopian dreams, doom, and consolation, with the most extraordinary cast of characters from music and history alike." — Osvaldo Golijov
“In words that are beautiful, passionate, witty, and utterly compelling, Alex Ross has written a true rarity — a book about music that makes you want to run and listen to every note he talks about. A masterpiece." — Emanuel Ax
"With every page you turn, the story departs further from the old fairy tale of giants bestriding the earth and looks more like the twentieth century we remember, with fallible human beings reacting to, reflecting, and affecting with symbolic sounds a flux of conditions and events created by other fallible human beings. And turn the pages you do. A remarkable achievement.” — Richard Taruskin, author of the Oxford History of Western Music
"Alex Ross has produced an introduction to twentieth-century music that is also an absorbing story of personalities and events that is also a history of modern cultural forms and styles that is also a study of social, political, and technological change. The Rest Is Noise is cultural history the way cultural history should be written: a single strong narrative operating on many levels at once. What more do you want from a book? That it be intelligently, artfully, and lucidly written? It’s those things, too." — Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club
"You don't have to be an aficionado of modern music to love this book: Alex Ross's extraordinary gifts as a writer, his deep knowledge of music, and his fresh forays into cultural history make The Rest is Noise a complete delight." — Jean Strouse, author of Morgan: American Financier
“A rare and successful weaving together of musical and cultural history, at once sweeping and accessible, written felicitously by a seasoned music critic at home in the history of the last century. An enticing and bold invitation to learn something of the great themes of the past century.” — Fritz Stern, author of Five Germanys I Have Known
