The scandal over modern music has not died--while paintings by Picasso and Pollock sell for millions of dollars, works from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring onward still send ripples of unease through audiences. Yet the influence of modern music can be felt everywhere. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalist music has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward. Music critic...

The Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame inductee and co-founder of Talking Heads presents a celebration of music that offers insight into the roles of time, place and recording technology, discussing how evolutionary patterns of adaptations and responses to cultural and physical contexts have influenced music expression throughout history and culminated in the 20th century's transformative practices.

Learning how to appreciate the unmatched beauty, genius, and power of concert music can permanently enrich your life. Why is this so? As award-winning composer and Professor Robert Greenberg explains, Music, the most abstract and sublime of all the arts, is capable of transmitting an unbelievable amount of expressive, historical, and even philosophical information to us, provided that our antennas are up and pointed in the right direction. A little...

The modern music scene was born at Woodstock in 1969, where half a million fans, dozens of artists, and the politics of the times came together in a big bang that would eventually generate billions of dollars. Over the last twenty years, however, MTV, compact discs, corporate consolidation, Internet piracy, and greed have contributed to a perfect storm for the recording industry. Frontline talks with musicians, record industry insiders, and journalists...

Examines various aspects of teen life in the 1950s, a decade characterized by the emergence of rock'n'roll, looking at the music and musicians, Elvis, movie idols, hot rods, fashion, and the youth market.

Beginning at the threshold of the modern era, with the late Romanticism of Debussy and Mahler, the author traces the new directions of music through composers such as Alban Berg and Anton Webern, Charles Ives, Edgard Varese and Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Philip Glass and Elliott Carter. The various paths are made clear by a concentration on the major works and turningpoints in the music of our time: the new rhythmic force...

Discusses the influence of people and events worldwide in the 1960s which led to electronic experimentation, the blues, hard bop, protest songs, soul, and radical modernism in classical music.

Discusses the influence of people and events worldwide in the late twentieth century which led to crossover between musical genres, stadium rock fund-raisers, hip-hop, rap, and the rise of world music.