Lang's monumental history of music and musical culture has stood for the past half-century as the definitive work of its kind. The scope of the book is vast, beginning with the music of ancient Greece and ending with that of the first two decades of the twentieth century. But music is not viewed in isolation. Rather, the author presents music as one of the many arts that, taken in conjunction, form the essence of the artistic spirit of an era.

This book began as an attempt to carry out a suggestion made in 1929 by Carl Engel in his "Views and Reviews"-to fulfill his wish for " a living record of musical personalities, events, conditions, tastes ...a history of music faithfully and entirely carved from contemporary accounts. Twentieth-century music has been described as complex, vital, diverse, uncertain, experimental, self-conscious, innovative-the list is long and growing. Composers have been both credited with and accused of always searching for something "new," writing works that are mechanistic but romantic, meaningful but unskilled, beautiful but ugly! In The Twentieth Century , Robert P. Morgan helps us grasp the flavor of the era by presenting forty-five readings from the period, nearly all written by active participants in the musical developments of the time. Thus we tune in to the voices of some thirty composers-from Busoni to Babbitt, Ives to Xenakis, Satie to Stravinsky-and learn from performers Anderson and Landowska, philosopher-critics Adorno, Dahlhaus, and Meyer, and writers Cocteau, Barthes, and Eco.