Alex Ross – författare

Alex Ross, the award-winning and bestselling creator of Marvels, Kingdom Come, and Fantastic Four: Full Circle, takes readers through the Marvel Universe—but all is not as it seems.Marvel Dimensions includes a bonus 32-page comic and is legendary artist Alex Ross’ second book in the Marvel Arts series, following the national bestselling, critically acclaimed, and award-winning Fantastic Four: Full Circle.The story opens with a sweeping tour through the classic origins of Marvel’s most iconic characters. Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Wolverine, and many others appear in dramatic, fully painted spreads that echo their earliest stories. A narrator describes each moment with confidence, guiding the reader through these touchstones of Marvel’s history.But as the story moves forward, the tone begins to shift. The voice behind the narration is not who the readers expect and carries a motive that slowly pushes the narrative somewhere darker and far more unpredictable.Once this change becomes clear, the book expands into something larger and more surprising. Storylines twist in on themselves, characters behave in unexpected ways, and events ripple across the Marvel Universe with growing tensions. Ross uses the structure of the book to create anticipation and pull the reader deeper into a mystery that keeps widening.Every new sequence reveals another layer, building toward a final act that reframes everything that came before it. A bonus 32-page comic book is included that is pivotal to the storyline.With Marvel Dimensions, Ross approaches the Marvel Universe from a new angle with new character invention that invites readers to question what they think and what they know. Marvel Dimensions may be the latest title in the Marvel Arts line . . . but it is only the beginning.

What If Superman Had Landed Behind the Iron Curtain?A Cold War-era twist turns the Man of Steel into a Soviet superpower.In this acclaimed Elseworlds story by Mark Millar and Dave Johnson, Superman’s rocket lands in the USSR—making him the champion of Soviet ideals instead of American ones. As the world teeters on the edge of a different kind of Cold War, Superman faces off against reimagined versions of Lex Luthor, Wonder Woman, Batman, and more in a sharp political thriller that tests the very nature of heroism. With a legacy that still sparks conversation, Superman: Red Son remains a bold take on DC's most iconic figure.Includes Superman: Red Son #1–3.

In the near-future world of Kingdom Come, superheroes are ubiquitous, but heroism is rare. After decades as Earth's champions, the members of the Justice League have all retreated out of the public eye, replaced with a new generation of crime-fighters whose brand of justice leaves humanity terrified, rather than inspired. But with the planet's future in jeopardy, Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman must come out of retirement to make one last stand for truth and justice...From comics writer Mark Waid and artist Alex Ross comes this definitive collection of the seminal masterpiece Kingdom Come, with more than 100 pages of sketches, annotations and other behind-the-scenes features.

’An absolutely masterly work’ Stephen Fry Alex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways,Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivalled Shakespeare in universal reach is implicated in an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

Alex Ross’s sweeping history of twentieth-century classical music, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, is a gripping account of a musical revolution.The landscape of twentieth-century classical music is a wild one: this was a period in which music fragmented into apparently divergent strands, each influenced by its own composers, performers and musical innovations. In this comprehensive tour, Alex Ross, music critic for the ‘New Yorker’, explores the people and places that shaped musical development: Adams to Zweig, Brahms to Björk, pre-First World War Vienna to ‘Nixon in China’.Above all, this unique portrait of an exceptional era weaves together art, politics and cultural history to show how twentieth-century classical music was both a symptom and a source of immense social change.This edition includes a definitive list of the greatest recordings of twentieth-century music.

The greatest criminal masterminds of our time appear to be acting in concert -- but with a surprising plan that seeks to achieve more good than the JLA ever could.They are the World's Greatest Super-Heroes. But the members of the fabled Justice League of America are about to learn that they aren't the only ones who can band together and work toward a common goal. The world's deadliest criminal masterminds have learned some valuable lessons from their past defeats, and their latest plan finds them acting in concert to bring about total victory--for the forces of good!Behind its seemingly sincere façade, however, this campaign to save the world is actually a carefully honed scheme to enslave it--by systematically discrediting and neutralizing the members of the Justice League, one by one. As the villains begin to gain the world's trust, our heroes must redouble their efforts to expose the truth--to fight...for JUSTICE! The DC Universe is stunningly reimagined in this epic tale from celebrated writer Jim Krueger (Earth X, Universe X) and acclaimed artists Alex Ross (Kingdom Come, Marvels) and Doug Braithwaite (Paradise X). Justice: The Deluxe Edition contains all 12 issues of the bestselling maxiseries and includes over 100 pages of detailed character biographies, developmental sketches, pencil art, bonus covers, collectibles galleries, and more!

Graphic novels to read anywhere: DC Compact Comics collect DC’s bestselling, most iconic stories in a new size!In the near-future world of Kingdom Come, superheroes are ubiquitous, but heroism is rare.After decades as Earth's champions, the members of the Justice League have all retreated out of the public eye, replaced with a new generation of crime-fighters whose brand of justice leaves humanity terrified, rather than inspired.But with the planet's future in jeopardy, Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman must come out of retirement to make one last stand for truth and justice... seting the stage for a conflict that will define what heroism truly is.Winner of five Eisner and Harvey awards, KINGDOM COME is the best-selling graphic novel from acclaimed writer Mark Waid and superstar painter Alex Ross!

An all-new Marvel Comics graphic novel starring the Fantastic Four, written and illustrated by renowned artist Alex RossIt’s a rainy night in Manhattan and not a creature is stirring except for . . . Ben Grimm. When an intruder suddenly appears inside the Baxter Building, the Fantastic Four—Mister Fantastic (Reed Richards), the Invisible Woman (Susan Storm Richards), the Human Torch (Johnny Storm), and the Thing (Ben Grimm)—find themselves surrounded by a swarm of invading parasites. These carrion creatures composed of Negative Energy come to Earth using a human host as a delivery system. But for what purpose? And who is behind this untimely invasion?The Fantastic Four have no choice but to journey into the Negative Zone, an alien universe composed entirely of anti-matter, risking not just their own lives but the fate of the cosmos!Fantastic Four: Full Circleis the first longform work written and illustrated by acclaimed artist Alex Ross, who revisits a classic Stan Lee–Jack Kirby story from the 1960s and introduces the storyline for a new generation of readers. With bold, vivid colors and his trademark visual storytelling, Ross takes Marvel’s first team of super heroes to places only he can illustrate. The book also features a special poster jacket, with the front flap unfolding to reveal an all-new fully painted origin story of the Fantastic Four. Welcome to the Negative Zone and MarvelArts—a new collaborative line of books between Marvel Comics and Abrams ComicArts—where nothing is impossible and anything can happen!

Includes a new chapter on John Cage.Alex Ross’s award-winning international best-seller, ‘The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century’, has become a contemporary classic, establishing him as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians; this is his much anticipated next book on the subject of music.In ‘Listen To This’ Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker, looks both backwards and forwards in time, capturing essential figures and ideas in classical music history, as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music that emphasizes the power of the individual musical voice.After relating his first encounter with classical music, Ross vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews wth modern pop masters such as Bjork and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and to indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. In his essay ‘Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues’, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history – from Renaissance dance to Led Zeppelin – through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament.Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross writes in a style at once erudite and lively, showing how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. He explains how pop music can achieve the status of high art and how classical music can become a vital part of the wider contemporary culture. Witty, passionate and brimming with insight, ‘Listen to This’ teaches us to listen more closely.

In Listen to This, the award-winning music critic and author of The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross looks forward and backward in musical culture: capturing essential figures in classical music history, as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music.From his own first encounter with classical music to vibrant sketches of Schubert, Verdi and Brahms; from in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead to the lives of a high school’s music students, Ross shows how music can express the full complexity of human experience. He explains how pop music can achieve the status of high art and how classical music can become a vital part of wider contemporary culture.Witty, passionate and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us to listen more closely.

Alex Ross’s sweeping history of twentieth-century classical music, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, is a gripping account of a musical revolution.The landscape of twentieth-century classical music is a wild one: this was a period in which music fragmented into apparently divergent strands, each influenced by its own composers, performers and musical innovations. In this comprehensive tour, Alex Ross, music critic for the `New Yorker’, explores the people and places that shaped musical development: Adams to Zweig, Brahms to Björk, pre-First World War Vienna to `Nixon in China’.Above all, this unique portrait of an exceptional era weaves together art, politics and cultural history to show how twentieth-century classical music was both a symptom and a source of immense social change.

In Listen to This, Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, looks both backward and forward in time, capturing essential figures and ideas in classical-music history as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music that emphasizes the power of the individual musical voice in whatever genre.In Listen to This, Alex Ross will combine a selection of his New Yorker essays with new material that will serve as an introduction to some basic classical-music concepts and figures and will give an alternative view of recent pop music. It will demonstrate the essential equality of great musical creators in whatever genre.It begins with ''Listen To This'', his most famous New Yorker essay, an autobiographical account of his early passion for classical music and belated discovery of pop music in college. It sets forth the themes of the book as a whole: how classical music can become a vital part of wider contemporary culture, how it can survive and even prosper in the face of proclamations of its decline.There follows a new essay tracing the history of the chacona, a dance form based on a descending bass line, which originated as an erotic Afro-Caribbean dance in the sixteenth century, then migrated to Europe and inspired such Baroque masterpieces as Bach''s Chaconne in D minor, and later found echoes in the bass lines both of twentieth-century classical masterpieces and African-American blues. Led Zeppelin''s ''Dazed and Confused'' and Bob Dylan''s ''Simple Twist of Fate'', among other songs, extend the principle. This chapter develops, in a less personal way, the themes of ''Listen to This'', and serves as a kind of whirlwind tour of five centuries of music history. Third in the introductory section is ''The Record Effect,'' an account of technology''s impact on pop and classical music.

’An absolutely masterly work’ Stephen Fry Alex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways,Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivalled Shakespeare in universal reach is implicated in an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the 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 programme.The years before WWI were a golden age for German and Austrian classical music. The story of this period – and a way of life soon to end – is told through the intertwined careers of the two titans of early twentieth-century composing, Strauss and Mahler.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

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 programme.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

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 programme.Against the background of the carnage and upheaval of WWI, Europe saw the violent birth of a new musical avant-garde. Ross examines the search for novelty and authenticity by Stravinsky, Ravel, Bartok and Janacek.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

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 programme.Tracing the development of the American avant-garde, Ross examines the crucial influence of African-American musicians on the classical establishment, the dawn of the Jazz age, and the forging of a new and uniquely American classical idiom.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

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 programme.Jean Sibelius hailed from the `small nation’ of Finland. Working in isolation, far from the great artistic capitals of Europe, Ross shows how Sibelius’s reinvention of classical forms went on to set the pace for classical composers around the world.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.The newly-created democratic state of Weimar Germany was, famously, a crucible for progressive art of all kinds, and classical music was no different. From Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera to Schoenberg’s development of the influential twelve-tone technique, Ross charts this flowering of avant-garde creativity.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.Ross shows how the flowering of avant-garde music in early twentieth-century Russia was co-opted, corrupted and crushed by the dictatorial ideology of Stalin’s Russia, with great composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev forced to choose between collaboration, exile or ostracism.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.With some of Europe’s greatest composers fleeing persecution under Stalin and Hitler, the USA in the 1940s became a place of refuge and of fresh creativity, both native and immigrant. At the same time, a newly democratic spirit meant that what had once been the preserve of the elite increasingly came within reach of the masses.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise.Hitler loved and was obsessed by classical music. This is the chilling story of the manipulation of some of German music’s greatest composers and cultural icons, and the persecution of others, all in the name of the Nazi’s deathly cause.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

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 programme.Following the Allied victory, all over Europe, young people were emerging from the rubble into adulthood – amongst them, leading figures of the post-war musical scene. They would be indelibly marked by their teenage experiences, their memories colouring their compositions.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

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 programme.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

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 programme.Benjamin Britten lived for most of his life around the Suffolk coast, and is buried in the Aldeburgh churchyard. He once stated that all his music came from there. `Peter Grimes’ is an opera of staggering force that is soaked in Aldeburgh to its bones.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. Britten’s music features prominently in the festival; `Music from Across the Iron Curtain’ is on 27 September 2013, `Britten Centenary Celebrations’ are on 2 and 12 October and `The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’ is performed on 3 November 2013.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

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 programme.After the war, composers took up what might be called catastrophe style with a vengeance. The twentieth century was undoubtedly one of the most horrific periods of human history - but terror was not always the subject of its composers. For some, attempting to transcend or reject the despair that consumed other artists led to the creation of some of the century’s most beautiful music.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

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 programme.After Paul McCartney listened to the electronic layering and looping of Stockhausen, the Beatles used the same effects on Revolver’s `Tomorrow Never Knows’ and put an image of the composer on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. For a split second during `Revolution 9’ the final chords of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony can be heard. Even the most jaded veteran of twentieth century music must have been startled by the influence of the post-war avant-garde on the psychedelic generation.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

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 programme.How can composition in the twentieth century be summarised? Styles of every description – minimalism, post-minimalism, electronic music, laptop music, Internet music, appropriations of rock, pop and hip-hop, experimental folkloristic music in Latin America, the Far East, Africa and the Middle East – jostle against each other, none gaining supremacy. `The Rest is Noise’ has been an aerial tour of this ever-changing landscape.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.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

’An absolutely masterly work’ Stephen FryAlex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways,Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivalled Shakespeare in universal reach is implicated in an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.