Reddit reviews The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the XXth Century. Covers modern music from the end of the XIXth to now. Most interesting and put in relation to the historical context. A must, although you do not have to agree with all the author's views.

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/0312427719/ref=mp_s_a_3?qid=1323456660&sr=8-3

Here are few I've read and would recommend:

• Noise/Music: A History
  
• Ocean of Sound
  
• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
  
• Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Lauria Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers
  
• Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music
  
• Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass
  
• Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond
  
• Electronic and Experimental Music: A History of a New Sound

If you haven't read this you really really should. It's eminently readable, entertaining, and comprehensive and I like it a lot.

Alex Ross of the New Yorker wrote a pretty comprehensive and interesting book, The Rest is Noise, on the history of modern music. It's not violin-centric, but it's still a good read. It's written like a narrative, and has nuggets of good stories about composers and performers.

You should check out Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts". They encompass more than just history, but they do cover a wide range of historical topics... not to mention, they're told by one of the 20th Century's most important composer/conductors. Someone took the liberty of putting them all up on YouTube; here are a few of the better history(ish) themed ones:

• What is American Music?
  
  
• Who is Gustav Mahler?
  
  
• What is Impressionism?
  
  
• Fidelio: A Celebration of Life
  
  
• Folk Music in the Concert Hall
  
  
• A Brithday Tribute to Shostakovich
  
  
• A Tribute to Sibelius
  
  Also, I can't say enough good things about this book. It only covers from about 1880 on, though.

I can't really add much to /u/ashowofhand's superb comment, except to say that if you can't access any classes on this topic, this book would be an excellent alternative starting point. It starts out at the very end of Romanticism and the very start of Modernism. Given that you like Bernstein, Mahler might be a useful jumping-off-point, and from there the transition to someone like Berg or Schoenberg is much more natural. I've found that taking a fairly strict chronological approach is really helpful - things stop sounding random and start sounding like part of a gradual continuum.

Edit: Yet another approach would be to work backwards: from pop music to art pop/rock, to stuff on the boundary between avant-garde and pop music, to fully-fledged experimental and avant-garde stuff.

Also, this is a bit of a trite thing to say, but just keep listening, and things will gradually crystallise for you.

I have a substantial library of music-related literature and reading about/studying music is my favorite pastime.

Generally I queue up a lengthy session of music intended for passive-listening when I set out to read critical/analytical texts. Any sample from one of the ambient subgenres, or modern classical, or field recordings of study-friendly atmospheres will do.

There is much more to music lit than just texts describing how music sounds. I have a strong affinity for socio-cultural criticism, particularly as it relates to sound art. And there is certainly no shortage of these texts available which explore music and society in various ranges of depth.

But to directly address the scenario you've posed - words about music - I can cite a wonderful example which I am reading at present.

Ethan Hayden is a linguistics expert, composer and performer currently pursuing a Ph.D. in music at the University at Buffalo, US. I had the pleasure of attending one of his performances of his work, "…ce dangereux supplément…" in 2015. The work is a set of phonetic studies for voice, video, and electronics in which Hayden makes a wide range of vocal sounds, none of which are coherent expressions of any known language.

This made Hayden a fitting author to tackle Sigur Ros' ( ) album for an edition of the popular 33 1/3 book series. The parenthetical album is sung entirely in the nonsense Hopelandic language created by the members of Sigur Ros.

So what does one write about an album with no discernible theme or statement? And how would one begin to describe the nonsense sounds of the Hopelandic language? Over the course of 150 pages, Hayden expertly addresses these questions, and presents both a critical analysis of Hopelandic and a philosophical perspective on the recording itself. The book adds a fascinating critical dimension to the album and aims to help listeners approach the recording with a greater sense of understanding.

I hope that this (somewhat extreme) example suffices to justify the task of writing about music. I'll offer a few other exceptional examples of music lit for further exploration:

Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music edited by Christoph Cox

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

and for an example of musio-cultural analysis, read

The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs.

Many of the best books written about 20th century music were written by relatively unsuccessful composers. Eric Salzman, Robert P. Morgan, even Alex Ross who is known as a journalist and not a composer studied under Peter Lieberson (Ross wrote The Rest is Noise).

That said, perhaps you'd enjoy The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music by George Rochberg. There's also Michael Nyman's book, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, and George Perle's collection of essays The Right Notes.

If you're really concerned about what composers consider important in composing music, I would read a book about 20th century theory & composition, not a history book. If it must be written by a "successful" composer, check out the classic by Vincent Persichetti - Twentieth-Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice.

Some of my favorites:

Messaien - The Techniques of my Musical Language

Straus - Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory

Ross - The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Chinen - Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century

Gottschalk - Experimental Music Since 1970

Perle - Serial Composition and Atonality

Xenakis - Formalized Music: Thought a d Mathematics in Music

Mann - The Study of Fugue

Here's some other stuff for people interested:

Joe Straus' Introduction to Post Tonal Theory

• For solid post tonal and heavily set theory based stuff
  
  Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music by Barry Schrader
  
  
• this book is old but has some cool stuff in it about earlier electronic music and it's cheap
  
  Samuel Solomon's How to Write for Percussion
  
  
• The best percussion book
  
  Rothenberg and Ulvaeus' Book of Music and Nature
  
  
• If you're in to, well music and nature this is a great anthology of writings by people like Cage, Takemitsu, Oliveros, etc. on the subject.
  
  Cope's Techniques of the Contemporary Composer is okay.
  
  
• for composery stuff
  
  My favorite orchestration book is actually the Blatter
  
  Composing Electronic Music by Curtis Roads is a very good new electronic book
  
  The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross
  
  
• Practically a must read
  
  On Sonic Art by Trevor Wishart
  
  
• is a must read also

I know this is a somewhat outside of what you asked for, but "The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross is great. It's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", but for music. It certainly made me appreciate music much more.

Just want to add: because so much of classical music is about history, you should check out some books or lectures on music history. I became a fan of the following while I was studying for my graduate entrance exams:

Robert Greenberg - Beethoven: His Life and Music

Robert Greenberg - The String Quartets of Beethoven

Robert Greenberg - The Chamber Music of Mozart

Robert Greenberg - Mozart: His Life and Music

Richard Fawkes - The History of Classical Music

Richard Fawkes - The History of Opera

The nice thing about all of these is that you get to hear the ideas that the author/lecturer is talking about. It's not totally in depth (some of Dr. Greenberg's TTC lectures are theoretically and analytically substantial though), but that's fine: a general overview is better for you at this point. You want to get a sense of the characteristics of the different periods:

• Baroque - 1600-1750 (Birth of opera to the death of J.S. Bach)
  
  
• Classical - ~1750~1820 (The Enlightenment period to the resurgence of humanism following the French Revolution)
  
  
• Romantic - ~1803~1900 (Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament to, I don't know, 1900.)
  
  
• Impressionism - Some people jam this in at the end of the 19th century, taking after the movement in French visual art (Van Gogh, Manet, Monet), but Debussy and Ravel have nothing to do with that movement and much to do with the Symbolist poets and artists. In other words, "Impressionism" is sloppy, lazy label that has become associated with these musicians despite their wishes otherwise.
  
  
• And the 20th century is often lumped into one big thing, but we can talk about pre-World War I, interwar period, World War II, post-World War II, and a million other divisions that have to do with shifts of global political power, social movements, technology, and other big events.
  
  Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise is a good introduction to 20th century music, though I find some of his statements problematic, and the pacing of the book is questionable in the later chapters.