Composing Modernism: Musical Formalism and the Experimental Turn in the Princeton School

Composing Modernism is the first book-length study to tell the fascinating story of a key strain of American composition during the Cold War. The Princeton School set aspirations for postwar music composition and discourse. Milton Babbitt especially sought a scientific conception of the composing researcher. Around 1967, J. K. Randall began challenging the School's tenets of twelve-tone composition, music-theoretical axiomatization, and electronic synthesis. Randall, Elaine Barkin, and Benj...