Our history books have reduced the course of twentieth-century music to an exercise in hindsight that shows a Darwinian evolution from the death of tonality to the triumph of the avant-garde after 1950. What's wrong with this picture, I keep asking myself. A more persistent question for many has been: what went wrong with music after 1950? My concert-going life has coincided precisely with a half-century in which contemporary music has been in one way or another problematic, while my historical studies have been almost entirely devoted to societies in which contemporary music was more important and more highly valued than that of the past. Everyone is aware of this decisive shift, which took place in the early twentieth century, but not all accounts tell the full story, it seems to me, and both composers and historians seem reluctant to address the question. It may be rewarding to look at a variety of twentieth-century modernisms in music and to consider opportunities missed and roads not taken.

For those who thought that the problem in 1900 was what to do about tonality, new modes and scales needed to be found. Top of the list in every textbook are Debussy and Schoenberg, the former for his exploitation of non-functional harmony and, as a sideline, his delight in whole-tone harmony, the latter with his invention of serial technique. Both were bold innovators, faultlessly passionate about their art.