Listen to This by Alex Ross

Listen to This by Alex Ross

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011

Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history--from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin--through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing.

Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.

Since 1996, Alex Ross has been The New Yorker's music critic. His debut book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Listen to This, his second collection of essays, won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. In 2008, he was designated a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2015, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow.