"Music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries explores the sense of possibility unleashed by the era's profoundly destabilizing military conflicts, social upheavals, and technological advances. Auner shows how the multiplicity of musical styles has called into question traditional assumptions about compositional practice, the boundaries of music and noise, and the relationship between composer, performer, and listener. He also examines how composers and their works have played important roles in the defining ideas of nation, race, and gender, and thus in shaping the modern world." -- Back cover.