Twentieth-Century Music in the West : An Introduction

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.

This is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It treats those forms as inextricably intertwined, and sets them in a wide variety of social and critical contexts. The book comprises four sections – Histories, Techniques and Technologies, Mediation, Identities – with 16 thematic chapters. Each of these explores a musical or cultural topic as it developed over many years, and as it appeared across a diversity of musical practices. In this way, the text introduces both key musical repertoire and critical-musicological approaches to that work. It historicises music and musical thinking, opening up debate in the present rather than offering a new but closed narrative of the past. In each chapter, an overview of the topic''s chronology and main issues is illustrated by two detailed case studies.