Listen to This - Softcover

Ross, Alex

Softcover

ISBN 10: 000731907X ISBN 13: 9780007319077

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2011

Synopsis

Includes a new chapter on John Cage.

Alex Ross’s award-winning international best-seller, ‘The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century’, has become a contemporary classic, establishing him as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians; this is his much anticipated next book on the subject of music.

In ‘Listen To This’ Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker, looks both backwards and forwards in time, capturing essential figures and ideas in classical music history, as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music that emphasizes the power of the individual musical voice.

After relating his first encounter with classical music, Ross vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews wth modern pop masters such as Bjork and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and to indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. In his essay ‘Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues’, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history - from Renaissance dance to Led Zeppelin - through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament.

Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross writes in a style at once erudite and lively, showing how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. He explains how pop music can achieve the status of high art and how classical music can become a vital part of the wider contemporary culture. Witty, passionate and brimming with insight, ‘Listen to This’ teaches us to listen more closely.

About this title

Review:

‘Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues. This essay is Alex Ross’s own chaconne, one that only he could have written – a display of lateral thinking as virtuosic, in its own way. It alone is worth the price of the book, which I strongly encourage you to buy.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘One minute, you're immersed in Mozart, and then suddenly you're on tour with Radiohead and contemplating what it must have felt like for an unworldly Finnish conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, to take the reins of the LA Philharmonic. Reading the book is the literary equivalent of an iPod on shuffle; it offers fresh and unexpected stimulation at every turn.’ Guardian

‘The qualities that make him a top-notch critic become clearer in concentrated reading...Ross is an avowed buff. He loves music with a nerdish obsession and he wants you to love it as much as he does’ New Statesman

From the Back Cover:

The main body of musical portraits and essays follows, with pop and classical topics intermingled. I will experiment with different options, and am open to suggestions, but I have in mind the following sequence: Mozart, Radiohead, and Esa-Pekka Salonen (music as a synthesis of disparate parts); Verdi, the St. Lawrence Quartet, and various innovators in music education (music as an act of communication and communal feeling); Debussy, Mitsuko Uchida, and Björk (the music of those who have traveled wide distances, either in physical space or in their imaginations); and, finally, Schubert, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Bob Dylan (music as a radical expression of the individual consciousness).

Table of Contents:

1. LISTEN TO THIS: A Memoir of Listening
2. CHACONA: The History of a Bass Line
3. THE RECORD EFFECT: Music and Technology
4. THE STORM OF STYLE: Mozart
5. ORBITING: Radiohead
6. THE ANTI-MAESTRO: Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Philharmonic
7. VA, PENSIERO: Giuseppe Verdi
8. ALMOST FAMOUS: The St. Lawrence Quartet
9. LEARNING THE SCORE: Music Education
10. TITLE TK: Debussy
11. TITLE TK: Mistuko Uchida
12. EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES: Björk
13. GREAT SOUL: Franz Schubert
14. FERVOR: Remembering Lorraine Hunt Lieberson
15. I SAW THE LIGHT: Bob Dylan

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 000731907X
• ISBN 13: 9780007319077
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288