Listen to This - Hardcover

Ross, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374187746 ISBN 13: 9780374187743

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010

Synopsis

Alex Ross’s award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing.

Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how 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

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0374187746
• ISBN 13: 9780374187743
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 364