Listen to This
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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 In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and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. The Washington Post - Michael Dirda Ross's essays themselves embrace almost every aspect of music, and for this he deserves all honor. In particular, he cogently argues that we need to ignore the artificial boundaries between contemporary pop and classical, that we should pay attention to ambitious music no matter what its source or how it's marketed. As a result, Listen to This includes pieces on concert hall oldies but goodies such as Mozart, Schubert and Brahms but also on contemporary pop gods like Bob Dylan, Bjork and Radiohead.
PrefaceWhere to ListenPart I1 Listen to This: Crossing the Border from Classical to Pop 32 Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues: Bass Lines of Music History 223 Infernal Machines: How Recordings Changed Music 55Part II4 The Storm of Style: Mozart's Golden Mean 715 Orbiting: Radiohead's Grand Tour 856 The Anti-Maestro: Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Los Angeles Philharmonic 1027 Great Soul: Searching for Schubert 1248 Emotional Landscapes: Bjork's Saga 1389 Symphony of Millions: Classical Music in China 15910 Song of The Earth: The Arctic Sound of John Luther Adams 17611 Verdi's Grip: Opera as Popular Art 18812 Almost Famous: On the Road with the St. Lawrence Quartet 20413 Edges of Pop: Kiki and Herb, Cecil Taylor and Sonic Youth, Sinatra, Kurt Cobain 21214 Learning The Score: The Crisis in Music Education 22615 Voice of the Century: Marian Anderson 23916 The Music Mountain: Inside the Marlboro Retreat 246Part III17 I Saw The Light: Following Bob Dylan 26718 Fervor: Remembering Lorraine Hunt Lieberson 28819 Blessed Are The Sad: Late Brahms 293Notes 315Suggested Listening 335Acknowledgments 347Index 349
