![]() ![]() It's taken me almost 2 months to wade through this book. This is not for the newcomer to the world of "classical" music. However, be prepared for some fairly advanced terminology. Ross hastens to assure us that he did not write it as a music history text, but as a guide for the educated concertgoer/ listener, and I think that's true. I would caution the listener that it's a fairly musically sophisticated book. But even if you already knew a lot about that, you're gonna understand what it was like to be a musician, why composers wrote music the way they did at certain times and places, and how people reacted to that music. Yeah, you're gonna learn quite a bit about what went on musically. The trick for the listener is to remember that this is world history seen through the lens of music history. Instead, Ross deals with places and chunks of time, putting composers and the way they wrote into the context of social and political history: Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, 20's Paris, New-deal USA, Soviet Russia, Post- WWII Europe, 60's NYC, and so on. I'm a professional musician and I spent an entire semester as an undergrad studying 20th century music, but there were many times during my listen to "The Rest." when I went- hey, I didn't know that! Ross starts us out at the turn of the 20th century in the hotbed that was German late-Romantic music (Strauss, Mahler), and we walk through the remainder of the 20th century, not necessarily in chronological order. ![]()
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