Composers on Modern Musical Culture focuses on issues of composition and style through a collection of original writings by major 20th century composers. Students are engaged by the wide spectrum of issues and composers that are represented.

This book recreates an exciting and productive period in which creative artists felt they were witnessing the birth of a new age. Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson all began their careers then, as did many of their less widely recognized compatriots. While the literature and painting of the 1920's have been amply chronicled, music has not received such treatment. Carol Oja's book sets the growth of American musical composition against parallel developments in American culture, provides a guide for the understanding of the music, and explores how the notion of the concert tradition, as inherited from Western Europe, was challenged and revitalized through contact with American popular song, jazz, and non-Western musics.

This title was first published in 2001. The last century has witnessed the ascendancy of the avant-garde in music. From Schoenberg to Boulez to Stockhausen, the avant-garde has defined the modern conception of musical creativity. Contemporary serious music demands the "new" in terms of style, form and ways of listening and hearing. Implicit in this approach is the rejection of the "old", from the baroque to the music of the later 19th-century symphonists. Paradoxically, however, it is this "old" repertoire which contiues to dominate concert programmes. An exploration of this dichotomy lies at the heart of this book. Drawing on a wealth of European philosophical and musical texts, the author examines the origins of the avant-garde and its relation to modernity in tandem with the history of the tonal tradition.

Over the course of three decades, Modern Music and After has earned its place as the standard work on the processes of musical renewal that began in 1945. It is essential reading for the enquiring listener, and is used widely in university and conservatory courses.

This anthology of essays, interviews, and autobiographical pieces provides an invaluable overview of the evolution of contemporary music—from chromaticism, serialism, and indeterminacy to jazz, vernacular, electronic, and non-Western influences. Featuring classic essays by Stravinsky, Stockhausen, and Reich, as well as writings by lesser-known but equally innovative composers such as Jack Beeson, Richard Maxfield, and T. J. Anderson, this collection covers a broad range of styles and approaches. Here you will find Busoni's influential "Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music"; Partch's exploration of a new notation system; Babbitt's defense of advanced composition in his controversial "Who Cares If You Listen?"; and Pauline Oliveros's meditations on sound. Now updated with fifteen new composers including Michael Tippet, György Ligeti, Gunther Schuller, Ben Johnston, Sofia Gubaidulina, and William Bolcom, this important book gathers together forty-nine pieces—many out of print and some newly written for this volume—which serve as a documentary history of twentieth-century music, in theory and practice. Impassioned, provocative, and eloquent, these writings are as exciting and diverse as the music they discuss.