John Rahn's prolific activities as a composer-theorist-teacher, inventor of computer sound-synthesis software, editor of Perspectives of New Music during the 1980s and 90s, and author of an exemplary text on atonal theory are conspicuously in the foreground of the academic music-intellectual world. This collection of essays charts Rahn's progression from the construal of music's data structures to the articulation of its experiential structures, leading to the question of its moral infrastructures and its value systems of the internal and external worlds. This book shows Rahn's remarkable...

This series of Norton books, devoted to informed discussion of contemporary music, draws principally upon articles first published in Perspectives of New Music, which Richard Kostelanetz has described as among the most consistently interesting magazines in America. The Perspectives books comprise a repository of the clearest thinking and most serious writing about twentieth-century music, forming an essential addition to the libraries of both professionals and amateurs concerned with understanding recent developments."