The approach of "Techniques of Twentieth Century Music is appropriate for composers exploring contemporary idioms, for performers learning to cope with the innovations of modern music, and for teachers developing their understanding and appreciation of the music of our time. All three categories are served by this text. It is designed to provide essential knowledge of the techniques and materials of twentieth-century music and to bridge the gulf between traditional academic training and current practice.

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.

The twilight of the tonal system -- Scale formations in twentieth-century music -- The vertical dimension -- The horizontal dimension : melody and voice leading -- Harmonic progression and tonality -- Developments in rhythm -- Form in twentieth-century music -- Imports and allusions -- Nonserial atonality -- Classical serialism -- Timbre and texture : acoustic -- Timbre and texture : electronic -- Serialism after 1945 -- The roles of chance and choice in twentieth-century music -- Minimalism and beyond.

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.

Materials and Techniques of Post-Tonal Music, Fifth Edition provides the most comprehensive introduction to post-tonal music and its analysis available. Covering music from the end of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first, it offers students a clear guide to understanding the diverse and innovative compositional strategies that emerged in the post-tonal era, from Impressionism to computer music. This updated fifth edition features: chapters revised throughout to include new examples from recent music and insights from the latest scholarship; the introduction of several new concepts and topics, including parsimonius voice-leading, scalar transformations, the New Complexity, and set theory in less chromatic contexts; expanded discussions of spectralism and electronic music; timelines in each chapter, grounding the music discussed in its chronological context; a companion website that provides students with links to recordings of musical examples discussed in the text and provides instructors with an instructor’s manual that covers all of the exercises in each chapter. Offering accessible explanations of complex concepts, Materials and Techniques of Post-Tonal Music, Fifth Edition is an essential text for all students of post-tonal music theory.

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