Modern Music and After

Abstract

This fully revised new edition re-establishes Paul Griffith's survey as the definitive study of music since the Second World War. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical re-forming of compositional technique and in John Cage's move into zen music, in Milton Babbitt's settling of the serial system and in Dmitry Shostakovich's unsettling symphonies, in Karlheinz Stochausen's development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono's pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis's view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio's consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that have continued to unfold. This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no single history of music. `We live' as Griffiths says, `among many simultaneous histories'. His study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how they converge and diverge. This book is intended for students, musicians, and general readers interested in the music of the avant-garde since 1945.

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