In an interview on Classical Music

What is The Rest is Noise about?

It’s an account of 20th century classical music, which can be quite a hard sell, but Alex Ross entwines it with the social history of the century, because that really is how the music makes sense. He does it quite brilliantly: it’s instantly been hailed as a classic. No one else has done a book on the 20th century with such colour and brilliance; this is a total tour de force. It whisks us through the various big events and big figures and also small figures like West Coast radical, mad polytonal composers like Harry Partch, who one would never know about – he weaves it into a really convincing narrative that makes total sense. All my friends who’ve picked it up who don’t know anything about music have suddenly understood 20th century music, and it is an amazing thing to have done something like that.

At times it reads like a novel almost: it’s got a real narrative thread. And there are lots of brilliant details that you would never otherwise get – personal accounts that Ross has taken from various figures. There’s a great portrait of Messiaen, who wrote this incredibly strange music: always glorifying God, but in the most seamy, slinky way. A very odd combination of sex and God, but Messiaen himself was completely without any dark side, and the description of this is so well drawn. Ross asks Nagano, a conductor who used to work very closely with Messiaen, for some dirt really, trying to find out where all this sex comes from. But the only story Nagano comes up with is an anecdote in which he remembers Messiaen and his wife devouring an entire pear tart at one sitting. That’s the worst he can uncover.