This is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It highlights the interconnections between different genres and styles, enabling better understanding of their aesthetics, practice and key repertoire. It is designed for easy use by students and teachers.
"Introduction Steve Reich pitched up in San Francisco in September 1961. He was a young musician, one who had been taken by the early-century work of the Hungarian composer and folklorist Bâela Bartâok, and he had journeyed west from New York in the hope of studying with Leon Kirchner, a composer in the rough-lyric Bartâok tradition who'd been teaching at Mills College. But Kirchner had just left for Harvard, so Reich ended up working at Mills under Luciano Berio. Over the course of the previous decade, Berio had become identified as a figurehead of the European post-war avant-garde: his ultramodern serialist work was quite a different proposition to Kirchner's own"--
