The pleasure of modernist music

"The debate over modernist music has continued for almost a century. The composers discussed in these pages - including Bela Bartok, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bernard Herrmann, Steve Reich, and many others - were modernists in that they shared a basic, individualist impulse to redeisgn music." "This is the first book to stake out a principled middle ground between two standard polemical positions about modernist music: the one attacking it as elitist, overly intellectual, and often incomprehensible; the other defending it as a music-evolutionary stage deemed "necessary" but also beyond the reach of words." "With an emphasis on recent contexts and debates - including film music, sexuality, metaphor, and ideas of a listening grammar - the contributors trace the meanings that such works and composers hold for listeners of different kinds."--BOOK JACKET.