Product Description

This fully revised new edition re-establishes Paul Griffiths'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 Stockhausen'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. In addition to the composers mentioned above, others whose music is discussed include Steve Reich, Jean Barraque, Elliott Carter, Olivier Messiaen, Gyorgy Kurtag, Bill Hopkins, Harrison Birtwhistle and Gyorgy Ligeti. Publication and recording details are given for the works of all these composers and many others. For its breadth and for its wealth of detail, Modern Music and After will appeal to both student and the general reader in search of a lively and comprehensive introduction to the music of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #297186 in Books
• Published on: 1995-11-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

About the Author
The author of numerous books on music, and for many years chief music critic on The Times, Paul Griffiths now writes regularly for The New Yorker. He is the author of Bartok (Master Musicians Series, J.M. Dent, 1984), Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th-Century Music (1986), Stravinsky (Master Musicians, 1992), and a contributor toThe Oxford Illustrated History of Opera (1994).

Customer Reviews

In spite of faults, it's the best on the subject.
This is pretty obviously THE book on music in the second half of this century. My own copy's pages are much thumbed, and I've used Griffith's desciptions as a guide to build my CD collection. The glaring omission (there was bound to be one at least) is Lutoslawski, one of the century's greatest and most enjoyable composers, who gets barely a mention. To Griffith's great credit, on the other hand, is his championing of Barraque, who's sometimes not even mentioned in other histories. Finally, though I think Griffiths is right to devote so much space to the big theoretical composers (Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Babbitt) he sometimes forgets that their music isn't always the best (Cage is barely a composer at all--more of a philosopher who makes his point with sound-events). Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maitre, for instance, is given too much prominence--it sounds really dated now (listening to it, you can just about see the Beatnicks clicking appreciatively, wearing their black berets), while the great music of Lutoslawski or Dutilleux, for instance, is barely discussed because it's less theoretically advanced. Still, Griffiths' descriptions and explanations are about as good as anyone could hope for, and the overemphases and omissions I mentioned are inevitable in writing a history like this. Like I said, this is still THE book on the subject.