Listen To This, the new book by Alex Ross -- coming after the monster success of The Rest Is Noise -- will be fed by Farrar, Straus and Giroux to our hungry maws at the end of September.
Maestro Ross explains:
The new book is a panoramic tour of the musical world, touching variously on Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Brahms, Marian Anderson, Frank Sinatra, Cecil Taylor, Led Zeppelin, Björk, Radiohead, Mitsuko Uchida, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Luther Adams, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Bob Dylan, and the Malcolm X Shabazz High School Marching Band. In the Preface, I say that the aim is to "approach music not as a self-sufficient sphere but as a way of knowing the world." The book includes material already published in The New Yorker as well as pieces written or heavily revised for the occasion.