Doctor Faust

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. Profiling Debussy and Schoenberg, two of the century's earliest innovators, Ross traces the development of atonality, and with it the reinvention of Western harmonic tradition. 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.