Listen to This - Tapa dura

One of The 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 Rossas one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essayin which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popularartists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublishedessay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history-from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin-through a fewiconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; givesus in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newarkhigh 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 This teaches us how to listen more closely.

ALEX ROSS has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.