A Bit Of Noise On, The Rest Is Noise: The Book
[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:10 AM Eastern on 6 Dec. See below.]
At this late date there’s little of critical value to be said about Alex Ross’s splendid book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, that hasn’t already been said by those better qualified than we to pass critical judgment. We received our copy of the book only two days ago and started reading almost as soon as we unpacked it from its Amazon carton, and, with interruptions, have so far managed to read only to page 212, the end of Part I of this three-part, 624-page volume. Even so, we feel compelled to express our awe of Mr. Ross’s depth and breadth of learning, and our enormous pleasure in his trademark lapidary prose — prose that’s image-rich and richly suggestive while simultaneously remaining perfectly lucid even when dealing with matters technical — before anything we have to say becomes so passé that one could with justice conclude that, like Rip Van Winkle, we’ve been asleep for twenty years. And what we have to say so far is that any objections one might feel constrained to lodge against Mr. Ross’s maiden book-writing effort (as opposed to honest disagreement with some of what he has to say, or remonstrations concerning what he failed to say) can be but mere quibbles and perhaps not even worth the mentioning.*
The Rest Is Noise was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2007 — one of the ten best books, period; not merely one of the ten best in category.
Based on our impressions so far, we’re not in the least surprised.
* Worth the mentioning or not, herewith our quibbles (so far).
QUIBBLE 1: The book’s opening chapter, "The Golden Age", opens with the premiere of Strauss’s Salome; a right and proper fanfare to usher in the tale of the music of the 20th century. But with the book’s detailed description of the opera itself and the audience’s reaction at the premiere performance, it goes on far too long before setting forth the Wagnerian prelude to that tale (recounted in the chapter's following subsection, “Richard I and III”); a prelude absent which Salome would not have been possible. Better it would have been had the book’s opening fanfare ended with the page-six sentence, “Then silence descended, the clarinet played a softly slithering scale, and the curtain went up,” followed by “Richard I and III”, and then a transition back to the detailed description of the opera itself and the audience’s reaction at the premiere performance.
QUIBBLE 2: A clear lapsus calami, certainly, but jarring nevertheless, is the page-seven sentence, “First, the notes C-sharp and G are separated by the interval known as the tritone, one step [sic] narrower than the perfect fifth.” The tritone interval is, of course, a half-step narrower than a perfect fifth.
Update (6:10 AM Eastern on 6 Dec): Part Deux of this review can be read here.
