Selected by Alex Ross

1. Robert Ashley "She Was a Visitor"

2. Kurt Schwitters "Sonata in Urlauten"

3. John Cale "Loop"

4. The Films of Mauricio Kagel

5. Charles Amirkhanian "Dog of Stravinsky"

6. Bernd Alois Zimmermann "Musique pour le soupers de Roi Ubu"

7. Pauline Oliveros "Sound Patterns"

8. Ezra Pound "Sestina: Altaforte"

9. John Cage "4'33""

10. Robert Ashley "The Wolfman"

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His work has also appeared in The New Republic, The London Review of Books, Lingua Franca, and The Guardian. From 1992 to 1996 he was a critic at The New York Times. He has received two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for contributions to the field of contemporary music. He played keyboards in the noise band Miss Teen Schnauzer, which gave only one public performance, in 1991. His first book, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," a cultural history of music since 1900, was published in October 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.