After Cook’s Carnegie Hall debut, when a well-meaning critic gave him left-handed praise, Cook stormed into his office and proclaimed, “I am not the world’s greatest Negro violinist.

The debut of Cook’s opera based on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” planned for the 1893 World’s Fair, was canceled because the female lead didn’t have train fare to Chicago. Yet many of his most fascinating pages arise from the author’s far-ranging primary research into subjects previously known primarily to academic specialists.Ī biographical sketch of 19th century African American violinist and composer Will Marion Cook is as moving as that of many better-known composers. Like any good encyclopedist, he draws on the best existing expertise. Ross provides engrossing, authoritative accounts of the emergence of atonality and 12-tone music the interlock between the rise of modernism in music and dance, in the ballets of Debussy and Stravinsky and Shostakovich’s tormented relationship with Stalin. The book concludes with the 1987 premiere of Adams’ “Nixon in China” in Houston. Ross begins in 1906 with the first performance of “Salome” in Graz, conducted by Strauss, a historic evening that brought under one roof Puccini, Mahler, Schoenberg and (so he would later claim) the adolescent Adolf Hitler.

What powers this amazingly ambitious book and endows it with authority are the author’s expansive curiosity and refined openness of mind. In “The Rest Is Noise,” the music critic of the New Yorker attempts to embrace the full range of 20th century music: to describe its sounds to trace its evolution and, to elucidate the profound impact of music on modern history, and vice versa.

The rest is noise review