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' is a demanding read. The art of musical and social analysis is always evolving and can be challenging to understand. 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.' Aaron J. West, Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association

Tom Perchard's work centres on the history and historiography of jazz and popular music. He is the author of After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France (2015) and Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture (2006). He is the recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project on popular music in the postwar British home. Stephen Graham is the author of Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music (2016). He has written articles on late style, fringe music writing and popular modernism. He is working on a book about noise music. Tim Rutherford-Johnson is a contemporary music journalist and musicologist. He is the author of Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (2017) and The Music of Liza Lim (forthcoming), and editor of the sixth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Music (2012). Holly Rogers is a scholar of experimental audiovisual culture, and is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013). She has edited books on documentary film sound, experimental film soundtracks, transmedia, cybermedia and music video, and edits a book series for Bloomsbury on music and media, and the journal Sonic Scope.