There has long been a need for an introduction to modern music for the general reader. This book fills that need. Beginning at the threshold between Romanticism and the modern era, with the music of Debussy and Mahler, the author traces the new directions of music. The various paths are made clear by a concentration on the major works and the major turning-points in the music of our time; the new rhythmic force that came in with The Rite of Spring, the unbounded universe of Schoenberg's atonality, the undreamt-of possibilites opened up by electronics, the role of chance in the music of John Cage. Naturally the emphasis is on those composers who have contributed most to forming the widened musical outlook of today. Apart from those already mentioned, the book considers the music of Alban Berg and Anton Webern, Charles Ives and the American experimentalists who followed him, Edgard Varese and Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. All are surveyed in a presentation which, without being technical, helps to explain how and why music has developed in the ways that it has. The illustrations include portraits, posters, costume designs, instruments and orchestras, as well as extracts from a wide variety of sources, many of which are beautiful as art objects in their own right.