Listen to This [Paperback]

One ofThe Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011

Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller,The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross 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 describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade atThe 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 In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music historyfrom Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelinthrough a few iconic bass lines of celebration and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 Bj?rk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and 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 Thisteaches us how to listen more closely.

An indispensable, erudite collection. Entertainment Weekly

Ross veers effortlessly from Mozart to Radiohead, and from Kurt Cobain to Brahms, bringing a pop fan's enthusiasm to the composers and treating the rock stars seriously as musicians.&A joy for a pop fan or a classical aficionado. The New York Times Book Review

So graceful, so pithy, so thoughtful, and full of insight&one cannot believe that anyone who loves music would not loveListen to This. The Christian Science Monitor

No matter how complex his thinking, Ross renders it in lucid, approachable language: as you read Ross's writing, you hear him talking to you. Fred Cohn,Opera News