Modernism and Popular Music is a study that aims at enlarging our sense of cultural modernism by including within a working definition of modernism popular art forms – particularly, popular music – along with the usual high art practices in music and literature with which we are all familiar. To this end, I have tried to widen our sense of twentieth-century modernism by discussing it in the context of the relationship between Enlightenment modernity and the experience of the early twentieth century. This relationship is particularly clear in the study of music, because much of what we assume is “natural” about music really emerged in the early modern period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At that time, as I mention in the Introduction, methods of musical notation, musical instruments as we know them today, the very idea of a musical key, standardizations of “tempered” musical tuning, the creation of the modern shape of leisure in which listening to music can be understood as a focused leisure activity separate from other activities, and even the conception of a composer all emerged. Music is also an art form, as I argue throughout this book, that more forcefully than the other arts emphasizes the materiality of the production and consumption of art. Such an emphasis on materiality, I contend, is also a particular feature of the modernist arts in the new twentieth century, where all kinds of “defamiliarization” – in painting, prose, atonal music, poetry – became an important aspect of the arts.