He demonstrates the enormous diversity and constant change that characterized every aspect of music during this period. By dividing his text into twenty-year spans, Downs is able to trace the development of musical style. Within each span he looks at the social conditions and daily life of the musician, and the aesthetics and audience preferences in structures, performing combinations and styles. The lesser composers, or Kleinmeister, are observed, since they are the most accurate mirrors of their times. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven receive full biographical scrutiny at each stage of their...

For this carefully selected anthology, the author of Classical Music has chosen representative works from the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. All seventy-six selections--complete pieces, movements, or integral sections--are discussed at length in the companion text.

Morgan divides his text into three chronological sections. Beginning with such giants as Mahler, Richard Strauss and Debussy, he discusses national movements, as represented by Charles Ives and Ralph Vaughan Williams; philosophical movements as various as the Schoenberg/Berg/Webern alliance or "les six"; and the giants who were "sui generis," such as Bartok and Stravinsky. The "isms" such as serialism, minimalism, indeterminism, the new romanticism and pluralism, are clearly delineated and the electronic boom of the last decades is defined.