This work seeks to explore the early part of the composer's life and career, concentrating on the pre-chance period between 1933 and 1950 that is crucial to understanding his later work. The essays consider Cage's influences, his evolving aesthetic, and his movement toward ideology that would later shape his work.

As John Cage once recalled, there were four musicians in the early 1950s who, because of their deep interest in art, associated closely with the New York School of painters: Edgard Varese, Stefan Wolpe, Morton Feldman, and Cage himself. This book explores the interaction and influences of the visual arts on these four seminal composers.

This work examines how female rock artists Tori Amos, Sara McLachlan, Me'Shell Ndegeocello, P.J. Harvey, Courtney Love and K.D. Lang explore themes of gender and sexuality in their musical and lyrical expression. Merging cultural analysis with musicological theory, the authors examine such issues as gender, performance, the female body, race, sexuality and desire.

Apparitions takes a new look at the critical legacy of one of the 20th century's most important and influential thinkers about music, Theodor W. Adorno. Bringing together an international group of scholars, the book offers new historical and critical insights into Adorno's theories of music and how these theories, in turn, have affected the study of contemporary art music, popular music, and jazz.

This collection brings together essays on postmodernism and music, covering a wide range of musical styles including concert music, jazz, film scores and popular music. The topics in the book include: the importance of technology and marketing in postmodern music; the appropriation and reworking of Western music by non-Western bands; postmodern characteristics in the music of Gorecki, Rochberg, Zorn and Bolcom as well as Bjork and Wu Tang Clan; issues of music and race; and comparisons of postmodern architecture to postmodern music.