MUSIC IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES

The music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in its cultural, social, and intellectual contexts.

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. Joseph Auner is Chair and Professor of Music at Tufts University. His publications include A Schoenberg Reader, The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg (with Jennifer Shaw), and Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought (with Judith Lochhead). A past editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Auner is the recipient of grants from the Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.