Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century builds on the foundations of Music since the First World War (first published 1977, revised edition 1988). It updates and reshapes the original text and places it in the wider context of twentieth-century serious music before 1918 and after 1975. The focus is on matters of compositional technique, with sections of detailed analytical comment framed by more concise sketches of a range of twentieth-century composers from Faure to Wolfgang Rihm.Extensive music examples reinforce this technical focus. Though in no sense a history of music concerned primarily with the institutional and critical climate within which composers live and work, nor an encyclopedia dealing with every significant composer, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century offers a critical engagement with that confrontation between tradition and innovation to which twentieth-century composers have responded with resourcefulness and vitality.

Ton de Leeuw was a truly groundbreaking composer. As evidenced by his pioneering study of compositional methods that melded Eastern traditional music with Western musical theory, he had a profound understanding of the complex and often divisive history of twentieth-century music. Now his renowned chronicle Music of the Twentieth Century is offered here in a newly revised English-language edition. Music of the Twentieth Century goes beyond a historical survey with its lucid and impassioned discussion of the elements, structures, compositional principles, and terminologies of twentieth-century music. De Leeuw draws on his experience as a composer, teacher, and music scholar of non-European music traditions, including Indian, Indonesian, and Japanese music, to examine how musical innovations that developed during the twentieth century transformed musical theory, composition, and scholarly thought around the globe.

Traces the currents that have shaped the development of music in the twentieth century and discusses the contributions of such composers as Mahler, Debussy, Stockhausen, Vaughan Williams, Bartok, and Stravinsky

In this wide-ranging book, Arnold Whittall considers a group of important composers of the twentieth century, including Debussy, Webern, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Janácek, Britten, Carter, Birtwistle, Andriessen and Adams. He moves skilfully between the cultural and the technical, the general and the particular, to explore the various contexts and critical perspectives which illuminate certain works by these composers. Considering the extent to which place and nationality contribute to the definition of musical character, he investigates the relevance of such images as mirroring and symmetry, the function of genre and the way types of identity may be suggested by such labels as classical, modernist, secular, sacred radical, traditional. These categories are considered as flexible and interactive and they generate a wide-ranging series of narratives delineating some of the most fundamental forces which affected composers and their works within the complex and challenging world of the twentieth century.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

One of the principal aims of this vast panorama of musical composition in the twentieth century is to arouse in the reader a thirst for contemporary music and to share with him the author's knowledge of and enthusiasm for the many masterworks in different styles that our century has already produced. The emphasis is on the development of the various styles to be found in the music of our time.

This is the first book-length survey of 20th -century British music for solo organ. Beginning with a discussion of British organ music in the last decades of the Victorian era, the book focuses on the pieces that the composers wrote, their musical style, possible influences on the composition of specific works, and the details of their composition. Arranged in chronological order according to date of birth are detailed studies on important composers that made especially significant contributions to organ music including Parry, Stanford, Healey Willan, Herbert Howells, Percy Whitlock, Francis Jackson, Peter Racine Fricker, Arthur Wills, and Kenneth Leighton. Composers' biographies, the role of organs and organ building developments, influential political and sociological events, and aesthetic aspects of British musical life are also discussed in detail. In the concluding chapter, the author discusses the major phases and achievements of the century and gauges what may lie ahead in the new millennium. A comprehensive Catalog of Works provides titles of works, dates of composition, details of publishers, and the dates of publication. More than 60 music examples, 12 black and white photos, and an up-to-date bibliography are included.