Conditions of Music

Music is performed, reproduced, and heard differently today as a result of twentieth-century technology. A new consideration of these changes is a practical and cultural necessity. In Conditions of Music, Alan Durant extends Deryck Cooke’s Language of Music, placing the insights of Cooke into a much wider sociological and historical framework.

Conditions of Music provides a basis for detailed commentary and criticism of music. Unlike literature and painting, around which illuminating cr…