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If nothing else, its enormous scope and thick forest of detail would make The Rest Is Noise impressive. But it has other fine attributes (as well as a few flaws), and its entertaining style tends to keep reader fatigue at bay.

The Rest Is Noise (the title is a play on Hamlet's final words) is a history of what most concertgoers would call modern music. But author Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, has a grander scheme in mind: He aims to examine 20th-century music in its sociohistorical context. The rise of the 12-tone system is covered, but so is the outbreak of World War I. Shostakovich and Strauss play roles, but so do Stalin and Hitler.

Mr. Ross is not exhaustive in his study of time and place. Rachmaninoff and Puccini were writing music in the 20th century, but they get hardly a mention. The book focuses on Europe, England and the United States (more precisely, the East and West Coasts of the United States). Not until the final pages does Mr. Ross give a nod to Asia, Africa and other regions, and then mostly in respect to their influence on Western music.

The impact on music of three of the great historical events of the century – the first and second World Wars and the Cold War – is covered extensively. Although cause and effect are not easy to tease out – for instance, whether the social and political atmosphere around the First World War had anything to do with the development of atonality – certainly historical events had just as strong an effect on composers as on any other group of citizens.

The effect was not always admirable. The outbreak of WWI stirred unseemly passions in many. In August 1914, Schoenberg wrote to Alma Mahler, "Now comes the reckoning! Now we will throw these mediocre kitschmongers [Stravinsky and Ravel] into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God."

WWII had a huge effect on music, of course. Like most commentators, Mr. Ross strongly criticizes the behavior of Richard Strauss, who remained in Germany during Hitler's vicious reign, but is much more tolerant of the actions of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, who remained in Stalin's murderous Soviet Union. You wouldn't know from The Rest Is Noise that the two Russian composers wrote odes to Stalin and other political-hack pieces.

It adds to the entertainment value of his book that Mr. Ross has a knack for ferreting out bits of intriguing trivia. For instance, there is the question of whether Hitler had a soft spot in his heart for Mahler.

In 1906 young Hitler attended a Viennese performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde that was conducted by Mahler. Hitler was mesmerized. He later told a friend, according to Mr. Ross, that he admired Mahler because he conducted Wagner "with a perfection that for its time literally shone."

Mr. Ross treats this story with some skepticism, but then, in 1940, Hitler reportedly told Goebbels that he "did not contest the abilities and merits" of "select Jewish artists," including Mahler and Max Reinhardt.

Most startling of all, Mr. Ross mentions the theory that Hitler's oratorical gestures were modeled on the motions Mahler made while conducting.

Mr. Ross is particularly good at portraying the stylistic battles that raged during the 20th century. The composer-conductor Pierre Boulez does not come off well in Mr. Ross's account. Mr. Boulez and his comrade-in-arms, René Leibowitz, were ferociously opposed to creators of tonal music, attacking them with the fervor of a grand inquisitor rooting out heretics. At least Mr. Ross gives Mr. Boulez some respect for a few of his compositions.

Mr. Ross has a gift for black humor, and his language is often colorful, if sometimes extravagant: "With his egg-shaped head, bulging eyes, and luxurious mouth, Stravinsky had a slightly insectoid appearance."

One can just imagine an investigating officer questioning a crime victim: "Could you give me a description of the suspect?"

"Well, officer, he had a luxurious mouth and looked kind of like an insect."

Although Mr. Ross obviously has his favorites, he tends to give all sides their due, and by the last words of Page 543, the reader will have a good sense of the main threads in 20th-century music.

Olin Chism is a freelance writer in Irving.

Listening to the

Twentieth Century

Alex Ross

(Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, $30)

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