Beginning at the threshold of the modern era, with the late Romanticism of Debussy and Mahler, the author traces the new directions of music through composers such as Alban Berg and Anton Webern, Charles Ives, Edgard Varese and Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Philip Glass and Elliott Carter. The various paths are made clear by a concentration on the major works and turningpoints in the music of our time: the new rhythmic force that came in with The Rite of Spring, the unbounded universe of Schoenberg's atonality, the undreamed-of possibilities opened up by electronics, the role of chance in the music of John Cage and the astonishing diversity of minimalism.
- ISBN10 0500202788
- ISBN13 9780500202784
- Publish Date 5 September 1994 (first published 1 January 1981)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 16 March 2001
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Thames & Hudson Ltd
- Edition 2nd Revised edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 216
- Language English