The Rest is Noise

I saw a reviews of Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century in the Economist some years ago, but I did not expect it to be THAT good. It's full of clever analysis of major musical works and trends of the 20th century, as well as .. superb gossip.

A word of warning: you'll probably find yourself listening to a lot of music through Youtube after each chapter in the book.

Some gossip that was new to me:

Sibelius was a recluse and drank a lot. Given that he was a Finn, nobody noticed. Hitler liked to entertain his guests by playing classical music on his gramophone, including Sibelius' Finlandia. The nazi affection with his works gave Sibelius a bad reputation among the Allies. Additionally, music theorists Adorno and Leibowitz really disliked him: for them Sibelius represented kitchy and backward romanticism whereas the future was to belong to atonal music.

Atonal music really got a foothold in Europe in Darmstadt music summer schools that were co-organized by the Office of Military Government of the U.S. and generously funded by other U.S. organizations. The generous funding meant that the composers did not really need to consider writing music to an audience other than themselves.

Edit/post script:
I had not thought about postmodernism in music before reading this book. I think Ross does not explicitly use the term. However Wikipedia's postmodernism article states, as I suspected that the ultra-modern atonal experiments of Darmstadt gave way to more postmodern minimalism (Cage, Riley) already in the 1960's.