The New Yorker music critic leads an audio tour of several hundred years of music history, from Renaissance lute songs to Led Zeppelin, showing how certain motifs of celebration and lament recur in many different contexts and cultures.
Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. From 1992 to 1996 he wrote for the New York Times. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, became a bestseller and has been translated into sixteen languages. Selected as one of the New York Times' ten best books of year, The Rest Is Noise won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. Ross has served as a McGraw Professor in Writing at Princeton University. In 2008, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
