Alastair Williams is Reader in Music at Keele University. He is the author of New Music and the Claims of Modernity (1997) and Constructing Musicology (2001); and a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to John Cage (2002) and The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (2004). He has also published articles in a wide range of music journals, including Music and Letters, Music Analysis and twentieth-century music.