This book deals with that development, with the questions it raises and the problems it involves. Above all, this development is interesting from the point of view of the subject itself—American music within the total picture of music today. It is fascinating also from another point of view: various forces have contributed to this development—historical, social, and economic forces—and action and effect raise, in one more guise, questions vital to the understanding of the world today and the state of contemporary culture both in the United States and elsewhere. In a summary discussion such as the present, many such questions—regarding the future of art and of culture itself, the nature and prospects of art in a democratic society, the fate of the individual today—will of necessity remain virtually untouched. They are, nevertheless, present by implication.

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