This work offers not only important statements by composers and critics, but also musical speculations by poets, novelists, philosophers, and others - all of which combine with Daniel Albright's commentary to place modernist music in the context of a broader intellectual history.[...]

How do you rationally connect the diverse literature, music, and painting of an age? Throughout the modernist era-which began roughly in 1872 with the Franco-Prussian War, climaxed with the Great War, and ended with a third catastrophe, the Great Depression-there was a special belligerence to this q[...]