Music at the Turn of the Century

Background and Origin

Most of the essays in this book were solicited for the tenth anniversary of the journal 19th Century Music, which has sought to encourage innovative writing about music--musicological, theoretical, and/or critical writing--since its founding in 1977.

We invited former contributors and some others to submit articles on the general question of the relations between nineteenth-century music and music of the early twentieth century. Responses to our invitation were published in two special issues in the spring and summer of 1987. The breadth and scope of these articles, and their collective cogency, sparked the idea of reissuing them under a single cover, as a book.

From the Preface

Most of the essays in this book were solicited for the tenth anniversary of the journal 19th Century Music, which has sought to encourage innovative writing about music--musicological, theoretical, and/or critical writing--since its founding in 1977. We i