Dissonance in 'The Rest is Noise'

I'm not quite done with "The Rest is Noise," the provocative new history of 20th century music by New Yorker music writer Alex Ross, but pending the end, here are some thoughts midstream:

-- What's with the title? Maybe I'm thick-headed -- I know it's a reference to the closing lines of "Hamlet" -- but it's not clear to me how it refers to the tortured history of classical music in the 20th century.

-- Ross is an excellent writer with a great eye for detail and historical anecdote, and his perspective on the composers and their work is intelligent and well-reasoned. But he tends to veer off in odd directions, as if he's not exactly sure what the book is about. Do we really need dozens of pages on Hitler's musical taste and how the Kremlin put the screws to Shostakovich? It's fascinating but it's been told elsewhere, and it takes the narrative far from where Ross seemed inclined to go.

(The subtitle is "Listening to the Twentieth Century," which is broad and general enough to cover a lot of material. Still, I think Ross was just filling manuscript pages at times, such as in his discussion of Duke Ellington -- I don't think Ellington, for all his genius, deserves a place in this historical pageant, unless Ross is preparing to dump a ton of pop music coverage in the late chapters.)

-- Call me old-fashioned, but I think Ross was obligated to footnote in the traditional way, rather than list all the references in the back of the book. Much of "The Rest is Noise" reads like secondary history, not primary research, and to my mind that requires explicit footnoting way up front. The book may not be intended for a scholarly audience, but in my opinion, that doesn't forgive the need for fair footnoting.

-- Last point for now -- what's Ross getting at by lumping the FDR-era federal arts projects with the Nazi and Communist control of artists during that period? From page 217:

The period from the mid-thirities onward marked the onset of the most warped and tragic phase in twentieth-century music: the total politicizing of the art by totalitarian means. On the eve of he Second World War, dictators had manipulated popular resentment and media spectacle to take control of half of Europe. Hitler in Germany and Austria, Mussolini in Italy, Horthy in Hungary, and Franco in Spain. In the Soviet Union, Stalin refined Lenin's revolutionary dictatorship into an omnipotent machine, relying on a cult of personality, rigid control of the media, and an army of secret police. In America, Franklin D. Roosevelt was granted extraordinary executive powers to counter the ravages of the Depression, leading conservatives to fear an erosion of constitutional process, particularly when federal arts programs were harnessed to politial purposes. In Germany, Hitler forged the most unholy alliance of art and politics that the world had ever seen.

Leaving aside the politically simplistic description of FDR, what's Ross getting at by lumping him with Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini? Is he suggesting that FDR's federal jobs programs for artists was somehow comparable to the monstrous abuses of the Nazis and Soviets? That FDR "totally politicized" American music of that era?
Since Ross never goes back to explain, that's the impression he leaves.

He repeats the same vague guilt-by-association on page 315:

Hitler, too, believes in "music or all." He demanded, for example, that new opera houses contain as many as three thousand seats. But in Nazi Germany, as in New Deal America, classical music could be sold to the masses only with pressure from above.

Again, what's his point? Most people would say it's absurd to feature "Nazi Germany" and "New Deal America" in the same sentence regarding arts policy; Ross is welcome to try to make a connection, but he never does -- so it just comes off as sounding kooky, and sloppy.