I'm just about finished with The Rest is Noise -- Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. I'll start by simply recommending it to anyone interested in classical music. As a cultural narrative, it's a triumph because it puts the fundamental crisis of 20th Century music in nearly purely cultural (rather than musical) terms. This means that almost anyone can read and enjoy this history without having to have a detailed musical background.
What Ross gets right, it seems to me, is the subtle connection between the end of possibility for the traditional strain of European classical music and the problem of filling the vacuum. Schoenberg and Stravinsky are the early heroes of the book, but they end up tragic figures: overtaken by the forces they have unleashed. Ross also draws another connection that I had never thought about: the connection between musical theater and cabaret in the 1920's and the emergence of jazz, bebop, Broadway and rock in the 1950's. It's interesting how the end of classical music isn't really the "end" but sublimation into other forms.
What reamins is the bombast and nonsense of Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis and the Darmstadt School. Ross is particularly good at pointing out the sheer craziness of the Darmstadters wihtout stooping to simply heaping abuse on their silliness.
It's interesting that Britten and Shostakovich are taken together after the 1950's and I learned things about Shostakovich that I had never read in any of the biographies. One wonders what happened to British Music in this period because Ross chooses not to mention Alwyn or Malcolm Arnold as reactions against total modernism.
Still, Ross really delivers and I highly recommend the book. It is at Amazon right now for about 35% off and that's a good value for a book that is going to give anyone interested in Classical Music in the 20th Century many hours of surprising pleasure and new insights. Ross is the music critic of The New Yorker and this success makes me want to seek out his reviews and interviews in that magazine.