Alex Ross
Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a cultural history of music since 1900, won a National Book Critics Circle award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His second book is the essay collection Listen to This. He is now at work on a third book, called Wagnerism, describing the composer’s vast cultural impact. In 2008, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Books by Alex Ross
The Rest is Noise
by Alex Ross
It’s an account of 20th century classical music, which can be quite a hard sell, but Alex Ross entwines it with the social history of the century, because that really is how the music makes sense. He does it quite brilliantly: it’s instantly been hailed as a classic. No one else has done a book on the 20th century with such colour and brilliance; this is a total tour de force.
Interviews with Alex Ross
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1
The Infinite Variety of Music
by Leonard Bernstein -
2
The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner
by Friedrich Nietzsche -
3
Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend
by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods -
4
Silence
by John Cage -
5
Music in a New Found Land
by Wilfrid Mellers
Alex Ross recommends the best Writing about Music
Alex Ross recommends the best Writing about Music
New Yorker music critic, Alex Ross, explains why writing about music is, really, nothing like “dancing about architecture.”
Interviews where books by Alex Ross were recommended
The best books on Classical Music, recommended by Igor Toronyi-Lalic
‘They don’t actually want to know anything, other than that this is a holy great art form beyond any other, that creates these über-geniuses who have no flaws and can do no wrong.’
