Revisiting the historiography of postwar avant-garde music [Book review]

Abstract

A volume with this title could contain just about anything. The editors seem to be conscious of this, and in introducing their book come across, at least initially, as somewhat evasive. It gradually transpires that the goal of their volume as a whole is not the construction of some sort of counter-narrative of twentieth-century his-tory, but a richer contextualization of music that has too often been narrowly defined by historians, whether lionizing or marginalizing its practitioners. The volume itself is a very broad tent, containing both full-throated critiques and full-throated defences of the eponymous post-war avant-gardes.