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Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) was the best-known Japanese composer of his generation, bringing aspects of Eastern and Western traditions together. This is the first complete study of his work. It is also the first book in English to offer an in-depth analysis of his music.

Twelve-tone composition has played an important role in American music from 1927 to the present day. Through close readings of many twelve-tone works, including pieces by Copland, Babbitt, and Carter, this book places twelve-tone music in a larger theoretical and historical context, and strips away the many myths surrounding it.

Tracing the changing musical, philosophical and intellectual currents of thought which inform Boulez's work, this study enhances understanding of post-war modernist music and Boulez's distinctive approach to composition. Campbell investigates encounters which link Boulez to the work of a number of important philosophers and thinkers, including Adorno, Levi-Strauss, and Deleuze.

One of the most influential composers of the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg's musical innovations still resonate today. Ethan Haimo challenges the popular notion that Schoenberg's atonal music made a revolutionary break with the past, arguing that his music instead transformed the past through a series of incremental changes.

In this thought provoking study, Silvina Milstein proposes a reconstruction of Schoenberg's conception of compositional process in his twelve-tone works, which challenges the prevalent view that this music is to be appropriately understood exclusively in terms of the new method.

In this book, David Metzer provides intriguing perspectives on both developments in music from 1980 onwards and the larger history of modernism, showing how modernist idioms remain vital in the contemporary scene. The study investigates what makes the decades after 1980 a distinct period in the history of modernism.

Erik Satie remains one of the most bizarre figures in music history, yet everything he did has its own curious logic, once it can be perceived. In this important new study Dr Orledge reveals what made Satie 'tick' as a composer, dealing with every aspect of Satie's complex career and relating his achievement to the other arts and to the society in which he lived.

For much of his career, the internationally known and still active Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has been understood as an iconoclast who challenged the musical establishment. Containing over one hundred musical examples, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of Andriessen's music, chronicling its evolution over the course of five decades.

The first full-length analytical study of Edward Elgar's music, this book gives a historical overview of its place in European musical history. Harper-Scott argues that Elgar was a modernist composer, and that his music constitutes a pessimistic twentieth-century assessment of the nature of human being. A detailed glossary is included.

Schoenberg's Musical Imagination is intended to connect Schoenberg's music and critical writings to a larger world of ideas. While most technical studies of Schoenberg's music are limited to a single compositional period, this book traces changes in his attitudes as a composer and their impact on his ever-changing compositional style over the course of his remarkable career.

Drawing on key elements from musical thought in inter-war Hungary, this 2007 book provides a unique perspective on the nation's musical heritage during the Cold War. Although Ligeti became part of the Western avant-garde after he left Hungary in 1956, archival sources illuminate his ongoing contact with Hungarian musicians, and their shifting perspective on his work.

This book, first published in 2000, examines the BBC's campaign to raise cultural awareness of British mass audiences in the early days of radio. As a specific case, it focuses on policies and plans behind transmissions of contemporary music between 1922, when the BBC was founded, and spring 1936.

Blending insights from linguistic and social theories of speech, ritual and narrative with music-analytic and historical criticism, Britten's Musical Language offers interesting perspectives on the composer's fusion of verbal and musical utterance in opera and song and provides close interpretative studies of the major scores.

This important new study reassesses the position of Anton Webern in twentieth-century music.

This book places the radicalization of art music in early post-war France in its broader socio-cultural and political context. It details the stances towards musical conservatism and innovation adopted by cultural strategists representing Western and Soviet ideological interests at the onset of the Cold War.

Conlon Nancarrow has written the most rhythmically complex music the world has ever known, so complex that it can only be realized on a mechanical player piano. His music has achieved international fame only recently, and this book details his life and compositional achievements.

Stravinsky's music has had a profound impact on the development of twentieth-century music. In this book, Jonathan Cross explores the technical and aesthetic legacy of Stravinsky in relation to a broad range of composers. He also proposes a re-examination of Stravinsky's neoclassical music and Theodor Adorno's notorious critique of Stravinsky.

This book provides a comprehensive view of Harrison Birtwistle's large and varied output. Structured around a number of broad themes - theatre, song, time and texture - the book discusses every work but avoids in-depth technical analysis, focusing instead upon the music's wider cultural significance.

This multi-faceted study looks in detail at the music and thought of Michael Tippett. The book is made distinctive by its strong interdisciplinary element: it relates observations on the music to ideas in literature, philosophy and literary theory and addresses issues concerned with modernity and postmodernity.

This wide-ranging study of Faure and his contemporaries reclaims aesthetic categories crucial to French musical life in the early twentieth-century. It considers such questions as the meaning of personal style in art and the representation of religious belief in music.

This book offers the most detailed account so far of the early works of Young, Riley, Reich and Glass, putting extensive discussion of the music into a biographical perspective.

This is the first book to present a complete and coherent picture of John Cage - universally recognised as the leading figure of the post-war musical avant-garde. The author presents an historical account of the composer's changing musical concerns, his styles and techniques and his many interests.

Composer Michael Nyman's classic 1974 account of the postwar experimental tradition in music.

Serial music was one of the most important aesthetic movements to emerge in post-war Europe, but its uncompromising music and modernist aesthetic has often been misunderstood. This book analyses the writings of important serialists like Stockhausen, Pousseur and Eimert and places them in a wider cultural, musicological and aesthetic context.

This is the first study of the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, widely considered to be the most important American woman composer of this century.

Since 1937, Poland's music has been influenced by violent political upheavals - World War Two, Stalinism, the 'thaw', the election of the Polish Pope and the rise and fall of Solidarity. Issues of how artistic freedom was exercised and how composers reacted to these upheavals form the core of this study.