Twentieth Century Music An Introduction by Eric Salzman

Six books in the series present panoramic view of the history of Western music, divided among the major historical periods- Medieval, Renaissance,Baroque,Classic, Romantic, and Contemporary.When Beethoven uses the familiar dominant-tonic cadence,it has a formal and expressive significance that is inseparable from the entire fabric and structure of the musical thought; when the same musical event occurs in Prokofiev,it is a local incident whose significance must be understood in other termsIt is true that certain underlying universal principales have retained force and validity,but since 1900 there has no longer been any necessity and prior assumption- any generally accepted premise preceding the fact of musical composition- that would strictly imply that any one musical realization must follow or be delivered from any other.