My first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2007 and is forthcoming from 4th Estate in the UK in March 2008. (Links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble. Independent stores: Book Sense.) It is a voyage into the labyrinth of modern music, which remains an obscure world for most people. While paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, twentieth-century classical music still sends ripples of unease through audiences.

The Rest Is Noise shows why twentieth-century composers felt compelled to create a famously bewildering variety of sounds, from the purest beauty to the purest noise. It tells of a remarkable array of maverick personalities who resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators.