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.

Tom Perchard's work centres on the history and historiography of jazz and popular music. He is the author of After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France (2015) and Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture (2006). He is the recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project on popular music in the postwar British home.

Stephen Graham is the author of Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music (2016). He has written articles on late style, fringe music writing and popular modernism. He is working on a book about noise music.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson is a contemporary music journalist and musicologist. He is the author of Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (2017) and The Music of Liza Lim (forthcoming), and editor of the sixth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Music (2012).

Holly Rogers is a scholar of experimental audiovisual culture, and is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013). She has edited books on documentary film sound, experimental film soundtracks, transmedia, cybermedia and music video, and edits a book series for Bloomsbury on music and media, and the journal Sonic Scope.