Identity and Difference

This book is all about the current state of music, about thinking, speaking, and writing about music in the immediate aftermath of that stirring and crucial twentieth century. Five distinguished authors with very different backgrounds, subscribe to the same seriousness of purpose: Jonathan Cross, Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann, Albrecht Wellmer and Richard Klein. Two of them are British, three are Germans; two are prominent composers, both keen and provocative writers about music, one is a musicologist and daring critic who specializes in contemporary music, two are philosophers and Adorno specialists dealing with such fundamental and highly complex matters as music and language, and music and time. It makes a fascinating read.