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How to listen to history from music
Although there are countless works about 20th century music, it is extremely rare for them to become bestsellers. For most listeners, the music works of the 20th century are hard to understand, let alone their works. In particular, the 800-page Cambridge music history mentioned above is not only an ordinary reader, but also a professional musician. But Alex Ross's noise is a surprising exception. The title of The Sound comes from two sources: one is a line in the last scene of Shakespeare's Hamlet, The rest is silence; The second is a passage from Cage: "No matter where we are, most of what we hear is noise. When you ignore it, the noise will disturb you. But when you listen, you will find that noise can be so charming. " In Noise, what Ross wants to do is not only to summarize the musical works of the 20th century, but to interpret the turbulent history of the 20th century through music. In his own words: "This is a book about the fate of musical works in the 20th century" (page 5 14). Here, he integrated biography, history, music criticism, sociology, aesthetics, psychology and other methods, trying to analyze the "cultural dilemma" experienced by composers of art music (including classical, jazz, pop and film) in the 20th century in a non-teleological, multi-level and multi-latitude way (185 page). The so-called "cultural dilemma" here has a wide range of meanings, which not only refers to the attitude of artists to traditional aesthetic concepts and their understanding of the fundamental definition of art in the 20th century, but also includes a series of crises that composers in the 20th century generally face, such as political interference in culture, the erosion of modernity, the proliferation of commercialization, the rise of mass entertainment and the increasing marginalization of classical music, the fracture of music value and function, the development of science and technology and the diversification of music art, etc. ..