Description
Book SynopsisIncludes a new chapter on John Cage.Alex Ross's award-winning international best-seller, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century', has become a contemporary classic, establishing him as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians; this is his much anticipated next book on the subject of music.In Listen To This' Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker, looks both backwards and forwards in time, capturing essential figures and ideas in classical music history, as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music that emphasizes the power of the individual musical voice.After relating his first encounter with classical music, Ross vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews wth modern pop masters such as Bjork and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and to indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. In his essay Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues', Ross brilliantly retel
Trade Review‘Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues. This essay is Alex Ross’s own chaconne, one that only he could have written – a display of lateral thinking as virtuosic, in its own way. It alone is worth the price of the book, which I strongly encourage you to buy.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘One minute, you're immersed in Mozart, and then suddenly you're on tour with Radiohead and contemplating what it must have felt like for an unworldly Finnish conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, to take the reins of the LA Philharmonic. Reading the book is the literary equivalent of an iPod on shuffle; it offers fresh and unexpected stimulation at every turn.’ Guardian
‘The qualities that make him a top-notch critic become clearer in concentrated reading…Ross is an avowed buff. He loves music with a nerdish obsession and he wants you to love it as much as he does’ New Statesman
