The same people who can happily queue up to view an exhibition by Picasso, Henry Moore, Andy Warhol or Tracy Emin, shy away from Schoenberg, Tippett, Cage or Birtwistle. Yet as Ross points out in his introduction, there still exists a powerful resistance, even on the part of quite sophisticated listeners, to grapple with modernism in music.
Go to the computer, type in Hildegard von Bingen, or Telemann, Prokofiev or Puccini, any name from Adams to Zemlinsky, and you can hear their music in one click. You no longer even need to search for a disc. Through recordings and broadcasting, virtually the whole repertory of Western music can be heard at the flick of a switch.
The audience for serious, or classical, music has never been greater than it is now. In his first book, the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross sets out to tell the story of 'twentieth-century classical composition'.
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