Listen to This

Front Cover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sep 28, 2010 - Music - 384 pages

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011

Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing.

Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.

From inside the book

 

Results 1-5 of 43

Page 7
... player in a searing performance of the Eroica. Did Lenny get a little carried away when he called that soft C-sharp in the cellos a “shock,” a “wrench,” a “stab”? If you were to play the Eroica for a fourteen-year-old hip-hop scholar ...
Page 22
... Players in the chacona band lay down an ostinato—a motif, bass line, or chord progression that repeats in an ... player Jordi Savall often improvises on the chacona with his ensemble Hespèrion XXI—centuries melt away and modern feet tap ...
Page 33
... player Diego Ortiz published a set of improvisations over a repeating bass line—a basso ostinato, or ground bass. The art of improvising on an ostinato went back centuries, although it had gone largely undocumented in notated music ...
Page 40
You have reached your viewing limit for this book.
Page 42
You have reached your viewing limit for this book.

Where's the rest of this book?

Selected pages

Contents

PART II
69
PART III
265
Notes
315
Suggested Listening
335
Acknowledgments
347
Index
349
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Listen to this
Alex Ross
No preview available - 2010
Listen to This
Alex Ross
No preview available - 2010
Listen to This
Alex Ross
No preview available - 2010
View all »

Common terms and phrases

Adams album American Anderson artist audience avant-garde Bach Bach’s band bass line Beethoven Beijing Björk blues Bob Dylan Brahms’s century chaconne China Chinese chords chromatic classical music composer composer’s concert conductor Conservatory culture dance disc Don Giovanni Dudamel emotion Eroica fans feeling German guqin György Ligeti hall hear heard Icelandic jazz Johannes Brahms kids Kiki and Herb kind lament Ligeti listening live look Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Marian Anderson Marlboro Medúlla melody ment minor Mitsuko Uchida modern movement Mozart musicians night notes opera orchestra ostinato performance Philharmonic phrases pianist piano piece play players Quartet Radiohead recording repertory rhythm rock Salonen sang scene Schubert seems Serkin singers singing Sonata song Sonic Sonic Youth sound String style Symphony talked theme There’s thing tion told tone Uchida University Press Verdi Verdi’s violinist vocal voice Wagner words writing wrote York Yorker young youth

About the author (2010)

ALEX ROSS has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Bibliographic information

TitleListen to This
AuthorAlex Ross
PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
ISBN1429977612, 9781429977616
Length384 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Music / Genres & Styles / Pop Vocal
Music / History & Criticism
Music / Individual Composer & Musician
  
Export CitationBiBTeX EndNote RefMan