A sweeping musical history that goes from the salons of pre-war Vienna to Velvet Underground shows in the sixties. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, gives us a riveting tour of the wild landscape of twentieth-century classical music: portraits of individuals, cultures, and nations reveal the predicament of the composer in a noisy, chaotic century. Taking as his starting point a production of Richard Strauss's Salome, conducted by the composer on 16 May 1906 with Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg and Adolf Hitler seated in the stalls, Ross suggests how this evening can be considered the century's musical watershed rather the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring seven years later. Ross goes on to explore the mythology of modernism, Sibelius and the music of small countries, Kurt Weill, the music of the Third Reich, Britten, Boulez and the post-war avant-garde, and interactions between minimalist composers and rock bands in the sixties and seventies.

亞曆剋斯·羅斯（Alex Ross）

1990年畢業於哈佛大學，1996年起為《紐約時報》撰寫樂評，著有《餘下隻有噪音》（The Rest Is Noise，2007）和《傾聽》（Listen to This，2010）。《餘下隻有噪音》榮獲2007年美國國傢評論奬、《衛報》優秀圖書奬，當選《紐約時報》《時代周刊》年度十佳和《華盛頓郵報》年度最佳圖書，並入圍普利策奬決選名單。羅斯獲頒美國藝術與文學學院的藝術與文學奬，以及新英格蘭音樂學院和曼哈頓音樂學院的榮譽博士學位。

郭建英

1953年8月生於北京。先後在清華大學和北京大學獲得計算機科學學士學位與碩士學位。現居美國舊金山灣區。除在信息産業從事研發、管理工作外，長年對音樂藝術與其他人文領域持有深厚興趣，受教於多位音樂傢、詩人、哲學傢。曾與其他譯者閤作翻譯齣版《瓦格納與哲學》。