DISCUSSION SUR LE LIVRE D'ALEX ROSS
Seulement 25 places

Le blog d'Alex Ross:	http://www.therestisnoise.com/

Invitation de Barbara Scales:

Hello Friends,

On April 16, all who are interested are invited to come and discuss, “The Rest is Noise” by Alex Ross.
Alex Ross is the music critic of the New Yorker magazine and the author of the blog, www.therestisnoise.com as well as this book of the same name. The book is now available in paperback.

Please come and join us at Espace Friedland on Thursday, April 16 from 6:30. There will be pot luck food and drink (bring something if you can), musical samples as well as a discussion of the book and the music of the 20th century.

Espace Friedland
107 Boulevard St-Joseph W. Montreal
RSVP: 514 276 2694.

Here is what the author and reviewers have had to say about “The Rest is Noise”

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and of the 2008 Guardian First Book Award; finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction; shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; one of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2007; also on best-of-the-year lists in the Washington Post, the LA Times, New York, Time, The Economist, Slate, and Newsweek. A New York Times, LA Times, and Boston Globe bestseller.

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a voyage into the labyrinth of modern music, which remains an obscure world for most people. While paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, twentieth-century classical music still sends ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, its influence can be felt everywhere. Atonal chords crop up in jazz. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalism has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward.

The Rest Is Noise shows why twentieth-century composers felt compelled to create a famously bewildering variety of sounds, from the purest beauty to the purest noise. It tells of a remarkable array of maverick personalities who resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with sweet sounds or battered them with dissonance, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art. The narrative goes from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties, from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies. We follow the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. The end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.

I started working on the book in the year 2000. The title I chose for the project, The Rest Is Noise, played off Hamlet's last words ("The rest is silence") and, more widely, the perception that classical composition devolved into noise as the twentieth century went on.

"A work of immense scope and ambition.... a great achievement." — Geoff Dyer, NY Times Book Review

"Just occasionally someone writes a book you've waited your life to read. Alex Ross's enthralling history of 20th-century music is, for me, one of those books." — Alan Rusbridger, Guardian

"Incredibly nourishing." — Björk

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. From 1992 to 1996 he wrote for the New York Times. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was published in 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, becoming a bestseller; it won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the Samuel Johnson prizes, and appeared on the New York Times's list of the ten best books of 2007. Ross has received a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center, fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the Banff Centre, and three ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards.
http://www.therestisnoise.com/