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 twentieth century be summarised? Styles of every description – minimalism, post-minimalism, electronic music, laptop music, Internet music, appropriation…
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 dictatorial ideology of Stalin’s Russia, with great composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev forced to choose between collaboration, exile or ostra…
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 golden age for German and Austrian classical music. The story of this period – and a way of life soon to end – is told through the intertwined careers o…
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, all over Europe, young people were emerging from the rubble into adulthood – amongst them, leading figures of the post-war musical scene. They would b…
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 up what might be called catastrophe style with a vengeance. The twentieth century was undoubtedly one of the most horrific periods of human history – …