In The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, provides a riveting tour of the wild landscape of twentieth-century classical music: portraits of individuals, cultures, and nations reveal the predicament of the composer in a noisy, chaotic century.

Starting with Richard Strauss’s Salome, conducted by the composer on 16 May 1906 with Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg and Adolf Hitler seated in the stalls, Ross suggests how this evening was the century’s musical watershed rather than the riotous premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring seven years later. Ross explores the mythology of modernism, Sibelius and the music of small countries, Kurt Weill, the music of the Third Reich, Britten, Boulez and the post-war avant-garde, and interactions between minimalist composers and rock bands in the sixties and seventies.

Ross will be in discussion with Greg Milner, the author of Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music. Spanning the whole of the twentieth century, Perfecting Sound Forever tells the story of recorded music from the first scratchy recording of Thomas Edison’s phonograph to the digital present, and introduces the innovators, musicians, and producers – from Les Paul to Phil Spector to Neil Young – who have shaped the way music is heard.

Milner debates how our understanding of music is shaped by the processes that create it, taking us on a riveting tour through all genres of twentieth century music, and looking forward at how major developments in recorded sound will shape the way we appreciate music in the twenty-first.

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