It's only fitting that the history of classical music in the 20th century was as tumultuous (if not as bloody) as the epoch that produced it. In the same way that the century's disintegrating monarchies gave way to competing ideologies such as communism, fascism, and democracy, music after Mahler fractured into various schools of dogma and doctrine that sought alternately to break free from tradition, engage it in dialogue, and occasionally reclaim it. And now, in a world of global capitalism that's at once liberal and hegemonic, contemporary classical music draws freely from all aspects of its past, as well as from non-classical sources, relatively freed from the anxiety of influence.

The term "classical" is, of course, fraught with meaning — and misleading. As New Yorker music critic Alex Ross makes clear, by mid-century many of the ostensible inheritors of notational Western music wanted nothing more than to repudiate the very aspects — tonality, rhythm, harmony — that defined it as classical. Work by composers such as John Cage and La Monte Young feels closer to conceptual performance art than to music, classical or otherwise. And that was precisely the point: to expand the definition of music to its outermost limits.

So fierce and inconstant was change in the 20th century that Igor Stravinsky could go from being considered riotously transgressive — although Ross points out that Rite of Spring was hailed as a triumph within days of its notorious premiere — to passé and reactionary in the course of his lifetime. Although not quite the "history of the twentieth century through its music" that its publishers would have you believe it to be, The Rest Is Noise is nonetheless an epic, incisive, and accessible account of a musical tradition's struggle to engage with a world of unprecedented change.

-Chris Parris-Lamb