Alex Ross

Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2008.A sweeping musical history that goes from the salons of pre-war Vienna to Velvet Underground shows in the sixties.In ‘The Rest is Noise’, Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, gives us a riveting tour…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Jean Sibelius hailed from the …

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.Ross shows how the flowering of avant-garde music in early twentieth-century Russia was co-opted, corrupted and crushed by the dic…

In Listen to This, the award-winning music critic and author of The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross looks forward and backward in musical culture: capturing essential figures in classical music history, as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop mu…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.The Cold War breaks out and mu…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.How can composition in the twe…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.The years before WWI were a go…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Against the background of the …

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.With some of Europe’s greatest composers fleeing persecution under Stalin and Hitler, the USA in the 1940s became a place of refug…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Benjamin Britten lived for mos…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Tracing the development of the…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.After the war, composers took …

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.After the war, composers took …

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.After Paul McCartney listened …

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.Hitler loved and was obsessed by classical music. This is the chilling story of the manipulation of some of German music’s greates…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Profiling Debussy and Schoenbe…

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.After Paul McCartney listened …

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Following the Allied victory, …

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.How can composition in the twe…

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.The newly-created democratic state of Weimar Germany was, famously, a crucible for progressive art of all kinds, and classical mus…