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Listen to This
- Narrated by: Alex Ross
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
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Publisher's summary
Alex Ross’s award-winning international best seller, The Rest Is Noise, has become a contemporary classic, establishing him 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 described his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of Ross’s 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 In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history - from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin - through a few iconic bass lines of celebration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 to 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.
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- Jason Anschutz
- 07-10-15
Educational!
I had to read this for a college music and culture class. The book displays more knowledge than I thought. This book is strongly recommended for any student, musician, or instructor wanting to know a rooted history of music education from Bach to Bob Dylan. This book has it all!
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6 people found this helpful
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- M. Jones
- 02-22-18
Even BETTER as an Audiobook!
If you could sum up Listen to This in three words, what would they be?
Alex Ross Rocks.
If you love reading about music - classical and otherwise - there is no better music writer than Alex Ross (and I say that as someone who is actually married to a music writer). After each chapter I wanted to immediately listen to the pieces he discussed. The audiobook is ideal because he sometimes includes examples of the pieces (which could also be found on his website, but this makes it so much easier!).
What was one of the most memorable moments of Listen to This?
I loved the Radiohead chapter and found myself even more obsessed with Jonny Greenwood after listening.
Any additional comments?
I can't wait to start on The Rest is Noise! I own both (physical) books, but after such a pleasant listening experience, I believe I'll be listening to that as well!
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4 people found this helpful
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- Peter
- 01-27-16
interesting
this isn't a story, or an account of history. it's just this guys experiences and ideas of interesting musicians that he's studies or worked with, from bjork to brahms to Radiohead to John Adams. it's nice that it had sound clips of some of the music.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Eric Wright
- 03-02-18
Good writing, terrible reading
This book was recommended in a really fantastic podcast I listened to about gated reverb and music in the 80s. The actual content is interesting and well thought , albeit a bit stuffy as though it were attempting to be academic but in fact is very editorial. But dear god, the narration is so boring. It's very monotone with only a vague attempt to add inflection. I might just buy a physical copy.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Armand Jarri
- 02-28-20
Boring
The author's expertise, and interest, is classical music. This is his frame of reference and the book is about classical music though it is markered otherwise. If you are not interested in classical music the book os not for you.
The main problem with the book however is the narrative. It is not clear where it is going and why. He fails to tell an interesting stroy. i stopped after few chapters.
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- By: Ed Ward
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 15 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Ed Ward covers the first half of the history of rock & roll in this sweeping and definitive narrative - from the 1920s, when the music of rambling medicine shows mingled with the songs of vaudeville and minstrel acts to create the very early sounds of country and rhythm and blues, to the rise of the first independent record labels post-World War II, and concluding in December 1963, just as an immense change in the airwaves took hold and the Beatles prepared for their first American tour.
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Author's blindspots mar this book
- By Mark Clark on 03-28-17
By: Ed Ward
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Major Labels
- A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres
- By: Kelefa Sanneh
- Narrated by: Kelefa Sanneh
- Length: 18 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music - as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities.
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Pure Pleasure Cultural History
- By A. Yerkes on 11-09-21
By: Kelefa Sanneh
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Fabric
- The Hidden History of the Material World
- By: Victoria Finlay
- Narrated by: Carla Kissane
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest? Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town? How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe? What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it.
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Unique + Interesting!
- By Mahima M on 07-30-23
By: Victoria Finlay
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Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion
- By: Bill Messenger, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Bill Messenger
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Original Recording
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Jazz is a uniquely American art form, one of America's great contributions to not only musical culture, but world culture, with each generation of musicians applying new levels of creativity that take the music in unexpected directions that defy definition, category, and stagnation. Now you can learn the basics and history of this intoxicating genre in an eight-lecture series that is as free-flowing and original as the art form itself.
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A Disappointingly Distorted, Myopic View Of Jazz
- By Parallax View on 08-18-13
By: Bill Messenger, and others
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Beethoven
- Anguish and Triumph
- By: Jan Swafford
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 39 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Jan Swafford's biographies have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world's most iconic music.
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Huge book - musical reader appreciates best
- By DMgraphicGlass on 01-20-15
By: Jan Swafford
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The History of Jazz, Second Edition
- By: Ted Gioia
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 21 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Gioia's History of Jazz has been universally hailed as a classic - acclaimed by jazz critics and fans around the world. Now Gioia brings his magnificent work completely up-to-date, drawing on the latest research and revisiting virtually every aspect of the music, past and present. Gioia tells the story of jazz as it had never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. Here are the giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history.
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An Exciting Opportunity Missed
- By Kindle Customer on 02-02-15
By: Ted Gioia
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Thelonious Monk
- The Life and Times of an American Original
- By: Robin DG Kelley
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 25 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the 20th century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers.
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The definitive bio of Monk
- By ricardo on 12-27-17
By: Robin DG Kelley
Related to this topic
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The Rest Is Noise
- Listening to the 20th Century
- By: Alex Ross
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 23 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The Rest Is Noise takes the listener inside the labyrinth of modern music, from turn-of-the-century Vienna to downtown New York in the '60s and '70s. We meet the maverick personalities and follow the rise of mass culture on this sweeping tour of 20th-century history through its music.
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Learned so much!
- By Paula on 02-18-08
By: Alex Ross
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The Ballad of Bob Dylan
- A Portrait
- By: Daniel Mark Epstein
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a vivid, full-bodied portrait of one of the most influential artists of the 20th-century - a man widely regarded as the most important lyricist America has ever produced. Acclaimed poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein frames Dylan against the backdrop of four seminal concerts - all of which he attended. Beautifully written, The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a unique, eye-opening portrait of an artist who has transformed generations and continues to inspire and surprise today.
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Excellent book, excellent narration
- By L chandler on 12-22-11
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Dig If You Will the Picture
- Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince
- By: Ben Greenman
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Ben Greenman, New York Times best-selling author, contributing writer to The New Yorker, and owner of thousands of recordings of Prince and Prince-related songs, knows intimately that there has never been a rock star as vibrant, mercurial, willfully contrary, experimental, or prolific as Prince. Uniting a diverse audience while remaining singularly himself, Prince was a tireless artist, a musical virtuoso and chameleon, and a pop-culture prophet.
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Reads like a indepth career review & analysis
- By herb on 05-18-17
By: Ben Greenman
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Catch a Wave
- The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson
- By: Peter Ames Carlin
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall