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 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.