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

informative slow-paced

4.75

...even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history.

This book was an incredible piece of work that showed how music, musicians, and composers changed over the course of the twentieth century, and how much that really had to do with politics and world events. I thought Ross's writing style was so engaging and clear - I never got bored reading this book despite the dense amount of information it contained. 

My one criticism is that from a feminist perspective, this book really falls short. I understand that he had to focus on the major composers of the century, and hardly any of those composers were women. But to talk about a century's worth of music making and hardly any women to show up at all....that's problematic to me. Nadia Boulanger got three sentences, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge wasn't mentioned at all, nor was Amy Beach or Florence Price. I don't think an overview of music history is complete without talking about what women have historically contributed to music.