Listen to this / Alex Ross.
By: Ross, Alex [author]
.
Material type: 
BookPublisher: London : Fourth Estate, 2011Description: xv, 380 pages : illustrations, music ; 20 cm.Content type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volumeISBN: 9780007319077 (paperback).Subject(s): Musical criticism | Popular music and art music | Music -- History and criticismDDC classification: 780 | Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Barcode | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| General lending | MTU Cork School of Music Library Lending | 780 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 00207541 |
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Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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.
Includes bibliographical references and index
Listen to this: crossing the border from classical to pop -- Chacona, lamento, walking blues: bass lines of music history -- Infernal machines: how recordings changed music -- The storm of style: Mozart's golden mean -- Orbiting: Radiohead's grand tour -- The anti-maestro: Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- Great soul: searching for Schubert -- Emotional landscapes: Björk's saga -- Symphony of millions: classical music in China -- Song of the Earth: the Arctic sound of John Luther Adams -- Verdi's grip: opera as popular art -- Almost famous: on the road with the St. Lawrence Quartet -- Edges of pop: Kiki and Herb, Cecil Taylor and Sonic Youth, Sinatra, Kurt Cobain -- Learning the score: the crisis in music education -- Voice of the century: Marian Anderson -- The music mountain: inside the Marlboro retreat -- The end of silence: John Cage -- I saw the light: following Bob Dylan -- Fervor: remembering Lorraine Hunt Lieberson -- Blessed are the sad: late Brahms.
Author notes provided by Syndetics
Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. From 1992 to 1996 he wrote for the New York Times. His first book, 'The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century', published in 2007, was awarded The Guardian First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer and Samuel Johnson prizes. In 2008 he became a MacArthur Fellow. A native of Washington, DC, he now lives in Manhattan