Music in Our Time: Trends in Music since the Romantic Era

The form society assumes at a given moment is reflected in the art of that moment. That art, so closely bound to the life it mirrors, is affected in an analogous way by the crisis through which the contemporary society may be passing. The art of our time illustrates this parallelism in a most striking way. And it is the object of this book to exemplify this correspondence in the field of contemporary music. from the author's preface