The Rest Is Noise Series: Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.The Cold War breaks out and music explodes into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances,and party splits. The language of modern music is reinvented. This short ebook looks at some of the extraordinary compositions of this period.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome dan…