Brave New World

This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, 'The Rest is Noise'. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival program. The Cold War breaks out and music explodes into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances, and party splits. The language of modern music is reinvented. This short eBook looks at some of the extraordinary compositions of this period. Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London's Southbank, ‘The Rest is Noise’ is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art's troublesome dance with politics, social and cultural change.