Twentieth Century Music
F 2020

The stately, structured march of great European music through the Baroque, the Classical, and the Romantic periods falls apart and goes wild around the turn of the twentieth century.  A hundred years hence this chaos still surrounds us. We cannot give it a name—other than “Twentieth Century Music”— nor can we confidently designate which works will survive. Our core text—The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross of The New Yorker—will help us bring order to this messy but exhilarating scene. Ross brilliantly discusses the music against the background of world war, depression, totalitarianism, revolutions, space travel, and exploding technology.  And we’ll listen, carefully and repeatedly—via both recordings and live performances—to the fantastic array of music created by artists of our century reacting to our world. They're speaking to us. Let's hear what they have to say!

WEEK 1:  The Rest Is Noise, Ch. 1 pp.  xi-32

Preface

Ch. 1 pp. The Golden Age: Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siecle

 

WEEK 2:  Ch. 2 pp. 33-73

Doctor Faust: Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality

 

WEEK 3:  Ch. 3 pp. 74-119

Dance of the Earth: The Rite, the Folk, le Jazz

 

WEEK 4:  Ch. 4 pp. 120-156

Invisible Men: American Composers from Ives to Ellington

 

WEEK 5:  Ch. 5 pp. 157-177

Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius

 

WEEK 6:  Ch. 6 pp. 178-212

City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties

 

WEEK 7:  Ch. 7 pp. 215-259

The Art of Fear: Music in Stalin’s Russia

 

WEEK 8:  Ch. 8 pp. 260-304

Music for All: Music in FDR’s America

 

WEEK 9:  Ch. 9 and Ch. 10 pp. 305-354

Death Fugue: Music in Hitler’s Germany

Zero Hour: The U.S. Army and German Music

 

WEEK 10:  Ch. 11 pp. 355-410

Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties

 

WEEK 11:  Ch. 12 pp. 411-443

“Grimes!” “Grimes!”: The Passion of Benjamin Britten

 

WEEK 12:  Ch. 13 pp. 444-472

Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties

 

WEEK 13:  Ch. 14 pp. 473-511

Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists

 

WEEK 14:  Ch. 15 and Epilogue pp. 512-543

Sunken Cathedrals: Music at Century’s Ends

Epilogue

 

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise Audio Guide. https://www.therestisnoise.com/2007/01/the-rest-is-noise-audio-guide-for-ipad.html  Here you can listen to brief excerpts of some of the pieces discussed in The Rest Is Noise, in an audio format that works on iPads, iPhones, and other devices There are also embedded videos, images, and links to archives, stories, and sound files elsewhere on the Internet.