Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Joseph Auner's Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries explores the sense of possibility unleashed by the era's destabilizing military conflicts, social upheavals, and technological advances. Auner shows how the multiplicity of musical styles has called into question traditional assumptions about compositional practice, the boundaries of music and noise, and the relationship among composer, performer, and listener. He also shows how composers and their works have played important roles in defining ideas of nation, race, and gender, and thus in shaping the modern world for better and worse.



Western Music in Context: A Norton History comprises six volumes of moderate length, each written in an engaging style by a recognized expert. Authoritative and current, the series examines music in the broadest sense--as sounds notated, performed, and heard--focusing not only on composers and works, but also on broader social and intellectual currents.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Anthology Repertoire (p. xii)
• Series Editor's Preface (p. xv)
• Author's Preface (p. xvii)
• Chapter 1 A Sense of Possibility (p. 1)
• Tangled Chaos and the Blank Page (p. 2)
• Modern, Modernism, Modernity (p. 3)
• Becoming a "Possibilist" (p. 5)
• New Possibilities and Perspectives (p. 6)
• For Further Reading (p. 11)
• Part I From the Turn of the Twentieth Century through World War I
• Chapter 2 Expanding Musical Worlds (p. 16)
• New Inner and Outer Landscapes (p. 17)
• Modernism, Modernity, and "Systems of Happiness and Balance" (p. 18)
• Gustav Mahler and the Symphony as World (p. 21)
• Alma Mahler and the New Woman (p. 24)
• Debussy, Symbolism, Exoticism, and the Century of Aeroplanes (p. 26)
• For Further Reading (p. 33)
• Chapter 3 Making New Musical Languages (p. 35)
• Atonality, Post-Tonality, and the Emancipation of the Dissonance (p. 36)
• Busoni's New Aesthetic of Music (p. 38)
• Futurism and The Art of Noises (p. 39)
• Strauss and Referential Tonality (p. 42)
• Skryabin's New Harmonic Structures (p. 43)
• Sehoenberg, Berg, and Webern (p. 45)
• For Further Reading (p. 54)
• Chapter 4 Folk Sources, the Primitive, and the Search for Authenticity (p. 56)
• Locating the Folk (p. 57)
• Sibelius: Creating Finnishness (p. 58)
• Ives's America (p. 61)
• Primitivism and the Folk (p. 64)
• Bartók and the Search for a Mother Tongue (p. 67)
• Stravinsky, Russianness, and the Folk Estranged (p. 70)
• For Further Reading (p. 76)
• Part II The Interwar Years
• Chapter 5 New Music Taking Flight (p. 82)
• Europe and America after the War (p. 85)
• Radio, Recording, and Film (p. 90)
• Music for Use (p. 92)
• New Instruments, the Sounds of the City, and Machine Art (p. 92)
• Jazz, Race, and the New Music (p. 95)
• For Further Reading (p. 101)
• Chapter 6 Paris, Neoclassicism, and the Art of the Everyday (p. 103)
• Neoclassicism (p. 105)
• Musical High Life and Low Life (p. 107)
• Music and Cultural Politics (p. 110)
• Antiquity and Ritual (p. 112)
• Eighteenth-Century Sources (p. 114)
• Tonality Defamiliarized (p. 115)
• The Art of the Everyday (p. 118)
• Jazz and "The Primitive" (p. 120)
• For Further Reading (p. 123)
• Chapter 7 The Search for Order and Balance (p. 124)
• Cultural Politics of the Search for Order (p. 125)
• The Twelve-Tone Method (p. 127)
• New Approaches to Rhythm, Texture, and Form (p. 136)
• New Tonalities (p. 142)
• For Further Reading (p. 146)
• Chapter 8 Inventing Traditions (p. 148)
• Villa-Lobos and Brasilidade (p. 149)
• Vaughan Williams and "Englishness" (p. 153)
• The Borders of American Music (p. 156)
• Copland and the American Landscape (p. 157)
• Still and the African-American Experience (p. 161)
• McPhee's Imaginary Homeland in Bah (p. 163)
• For Further Reading (p. 166)
• Part III World War II and Its Aftermath
• Chapter 9 Rebuilding amid the Ruins (p. 172)
• Social Transformations (p. 175)
• Britten's War Requiem (p. 176)
• Musical Ramifications of the Cold War (p. 181)
• Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 (p. 183)
• For Further Reading (p. 189)
• Chapter 10 Trajectories of Order and Chance (p. 190)
• Post-World War II Contexts (p. 191)
• Twelve-Tone Composition after World War II (p. 192)
• Integral Serialism (p. 193)
• Chance, Indeterminacy, and the Blank Page (p. 199)
• For Further Reading (p. 211)
• Chapter 11 Electronic Music from the Gold War to the Computer Age (p. 212)
• Music, Science, and Technology in the Cold war (p. 214)
• Manipulating Sound in the Studio (p. 217)
• Musique Concrète (p. 222)
• Notating, Analyzing, and Listening to Electronic Music (p. 223)
• Synthesizers (p. 224)
• Computer Music (p. 228)
• For Further Reading (p. 232)
• Part IV From the 1960s to the Present
• Chapter 12 Texture, Timbre, Loops, and Layers (p. 235)
• Origins of Texture Music (p. 236)
• Ligeri's Sonorous Textures and Micropolyphony (p. 238)
• Textual Approaches in the Music of Stockhausen and Boulez (p. 240)
• Mathematical Models (p. 242)
• Timbre and Extended Techniques (p. 246)
• Composing with Layers (p. 251)
• For Further Reading (p. 255)
• Chapter 13 Histories Recollected and Remade (p. 257)
• The Past in the Present (p. 258)
• Quotation, Protest, and Social Change (p. 260)
• Postmodernism (p. 266)
• Remaking Traditions (p. 272)
• For Further Reading (p. 276)
• Chapter 14 Minimalism and Its Repercussions (p. 278)
• Origins and Locales (p. 280)
• Minimalist Art and Musical Processes (p. 283)
• Minimalist Sources (p. 288)
• Pathways of Postminimalism (p. 293)
• For Further Reading (p. 297)
• Chapter 15 Border Crossings (p. 299)
• Global Encounters (p. 300)
• Music In-Between (p. 301)
• Multimedia and Sound Art (p. 302)
• Music, Science, and Technology (p. 303)
• Artist and Audience (p. 304)
• For Further Reading (p. 305)
• Glossary (p. A1)
• Endnotes (p. A10)
• Credits (p. A22)
• Index (p. A25)