The rest is noise / El ruido eterno

2010 / 05 / 23 - Every Good Song

You may tell the story of the twentieth century through its music. From the roaring twenties to today. Passing by Hitler, Stalin and Mao. And Franco forgetting because Spain has not only in world history, much less if we count from the perspective of music.

Alex Ross tells this story in the book The rest is noise, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Guardian First Book Award and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. It has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Samuel Johnson Prize, and has been chosen as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, LA Times, The Economist, Slate and Newsweek.

Talk of a struggle: those men who rebelled against the cult of the classical past, baroque, romantic and suffered the indifference of the public. The history of our music: Berg, Stravinsky, Britten, Messiaen ... our great unknown.

The title is a play on words from the end of Hamlet: "The rest is silence" ("The rest is silence"). Roos titled his book: The rest is noise -in the Castilian version El ruido eterno.