Nicholas Cook is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Director of the AHRB Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music. His books include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987), Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990), the Cambridge Music Handbook Beethoven: Symphony no. 9 (1993), Analysing Musical Multimedia and Music: A Very Short Introduction (both 1998). Anthony Pople was Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham until his death in 2003. His publications include two Cambridge Music Handbooks - Berg: Violin Concerto (1991) and Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1998); he edited Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music (1994) as well as The Cambridge Companion to Berg (1997).

• Introduction: trajectories of twentieth-century music Nicholas Cook with Anthony Pople; 1. Peripheries and interfaces: the Western impact on other music Jonathan Stock; 2. Music of a century: museum culture and the politics of subsidy Leon Botstein; 3. Innovation and the avant-garde, 1900–20 Christopher Butler; 4. Music, text and stage: the tradition of bourgeois tonality to the Second World War Stephen Banfield; 5. Classic jazz to 1945 James Lincoln Collier; 6. Flirting with the vernacular: America in Europe, 1900–1945 Susan C. Cook; 7. Between the wars: traditions, modernisms, and the 'little people from the suburbs' Peter Franklin; 8. Brave new worlds: experimentalism between the wars David Nicholls; 9. Proclaiming a mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern Joseph Auner; 10. Rewriting the past: classicisms of the inter-war period Hermann Danuser; 11. Music of seriousness and commitment: the 1930s and beyond Michael Walter; 12. Other mainstreams: light music and easy listening, 1920–70 Derek B. Scott; 13. New beginnings: the international avant-garde, 1945–62 David Osmond-Smith; 14. Individualism and accessibility: the moderate mainstream, 1945–75 Arnold Whittall; 15. After swing: modern jazz and its impact Mervyn Cooke; 16. Music of the youth revolution: rock through the 1960s Robynn Stilwell; 17. Expanding horizons: the international avant-garde, 1962–75 Richard Toop; 18. To the millennium: music as twentieth-century commodity Andrew Blake; 19. Ageing of the new: the museum of musical modernism Alastair Williams; 20. (Post-)minimalisms, 1975–2000: the search for a new mainstream Robert Fink; 21. History and class consciousness: pop music towards 2000 Dai Griffiths; 22. 'Art' music in a cross-cultural context: the case of Africa Martin Scherzinger; Appendix 1. Personalia Peter Elsdon with Björn Heile; Appendix 2. Chronology Peter Elsdon and Peter Jones.

'Its pluralist narrative finds room for pop, jazz and easy listening alongside classical mainstreams and avant-garde orthodoxies. The non-interventionist stance makes for lively debate between contributors, reflecting the revisionist brand of musicology where the importance of any musical culture must be constantly contested.' The Independent