The Rest Is Noise Series: Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.After Paul McCartney listened to the electronic layering and looping of Stockhausen, the Beatles used the same effects on Revolver’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and put an image of the composer on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. For a split second during ‘Revolution 9’ the final chords of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony can be heard. Even the most jaded veteran of twentieth century music must have been startled by the influence of the post-war avant-garde on…