In his quest for an accessible narrative, Ross frequently has to contend with the bitter intellectual squabbles that plagued the classical world during this period. But his analysis ultimately transcends bias, giving equal weight to populist triumphs like George Gershwin’s and mind-bending experiments such as Cage’s infamous “silent work,” 4'33". The book also provides rich, incisive portraits of oft-misunderstood composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten that read more like psychology than musicology. Ross painstakingly documents how Stalin’s diabolical mind games led the former composer to bury his radical artistic voice beneath a patriotic facade, and how, in Britten’s case, repressed pedophiliac longings proved just as destructive.

Much as Ross infuses his accounts of composers’ lives with emotional insight, he balances hard music theory with brilliantly evocative descriptions—his analysis of Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano makes reference to “two-note patterns dripping like blood on marble” and “monster chords…which saturate the senses and shut down the intellect.” The author, who initially trained as a pianist—he describes his own attempts at composition as “ersatz Schubert and Brahms”—makes a point to always ground such metaphorical language in the nuts and bolts of a piece. “I listen on two levels: First, I have all my scores and I try to figure out what’s going on bar by bar in musical terms,” he says. “But afterward I sort of zero in and say, There’s something happening right here, some kind of break or surge in the music. There’s just this purely emotional reaction, and I try to figure out, How can I verbalize this?”

The solutions he devises are enough to send any music fan scrambling for the compositions themselves (Ross appends two elegantly concise lists: “Ten Recommended Recordings” and “Twenty More”). But The Rest Is Noise doesn’t just illuminate the classical works in question. Ross makes a point of highlighting the moments when this music has intersected with the pop world. It’s a lot easier to understand Brian Eno’s late-’70s invention of ambient music, for example, after you learn in chapter 14 that he attended concerts by minimalist composers Philip Glass and Reich earlier in the decade.

For the author, who has covered artists such as Radiohead and Pavement in The New Yorker, avant-garde classical music actually served as a bridge into other genres. “I was listening to this very noisy, chaotic postwar avant-garde music in college, and I had a friend who was a jazz guy and he said, ‘You know, this sounds just like Cecil Taylor.’ And then the punk rock people said, ‘That sounds just like Sonic Youth.’ So for a few years, all I would listen to was just very noisy indie rock.” After a pause, he adds, “And people can take the same path from the opposite direction, from Sonic Youth to John Cage and then back to Schoenberg and eventually winding up at Beethoven. You don’t have to start at the ground floor—you can come in the back door.” For many future modern-classical fans, The Rest Is Noise ought to serve as exactly such an alternative entrance.