Twentieth-Century Music in the West: An Introduction
Tom Perchard, Stephen Graham, Tim Rutherford-Johnson and Holly Rogers. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
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.
"Twentieth-Century Music in the West covers a large amount of material succinctly yet thoroughly. I teach a ‘Music Since 1900’ course for undergraduates every year and have adopted Twentieth-Century Music in the West for Spring 2024.
The book also accomplishes the incorporation of recent educational and societal goals, heretofore missing from most textbooks: de-canonisation, decolonisation and better representation of music figures of all genders and sexual orientations."
Christian Carey, Tempo
"Each author brings a unique and essential specialization to this text. Tom Perchard specializes in the history and historiography of various jazz and popular music styles. Stephen Graham's scholarly background is in underground music, while Tim Rutherford-Johnson is an author–blogger writing on new music. Lastly, Holly Rogers specializes in music, media, and art music. The diversity of these renowned scholars is important because this text is equally diverse and complex.
Despite the complexities involved, Perchard, Graham, Rutherford-Johnson, and Rogers did an outstanding job in summarizing over one hundred years of observation, discussion, and analysis … Moreover, the number of citations and references is remarkable. One could use this text as the source of countless musicological inquiries."
Aaron J. West, Notes