Alex Ross' bestseller The Rest Is Noise is a great read for music lovers of any genre who are interested in finding out what music is about and what "contemporary music" also means beyond "now that's what I can music!". He's blog,
therestisnoise.com is one of the very first classical music blogs that inspired numerous readers and other bloggers. It seems that nowadays he mainly updates his New Yorker blog
Unquiet Thoughts.
He posted a twentieth-century playlist
here, originally for the iTunes store. I made a Spotify playlist after that, most of the tracks are available in Spotify, for the few ones that the very recording version he chose was not available, I substituted with the best recordings I can find.
Here's the Spotify playlist: Alex Ross' 20th Century Limited Kudos to Mr. Ross, and enjoy the music.
I was thinking of doing this, but a playlist for each chapter. Great that you have already. But, there are a lot more pieces mentioned in the book than make it to your playlist. For example, in the Britten chapter Ross focusses on Peter Grimes (though she discusses Death in Venice) so you could of included the Pears/Britten recording http://open.spotify.com/album/2Xiiqx1tJk8Cnp2PXuJvtv though I cannot see the Vickers one she loved on Spotify
ReplyDeleteWhoop, wrong url! Try this http://open.spotify.com/album/5I4HVjWL7u6L6BbHCSvrGe
ReplyDeletegreat idea! I've made mine too a couple of month ago :)
ReplyDeletehttp://open.spotify.com/user/matas/playlist/18VK5QqRDwisgTTqzkcuRn
I used to hold the ambition to create playlists for each works appeared on every page. And unfortunately I lost my iPad which had all the highlights on almost 2/3 of the book. And hope some day, some one could have it done.
ReplyDelete