We start with Strauss and the fin de siecle; tour the century's tonalists and
atonalists (those who used traditional scales and chords, and those who didn't); are introduced to Americans, from Charles Ives and Aaron Copland through the contemporary music organization Bang on a Can; and observe the fraught careers of eomposers under Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.
Whether we want to be serialists,
atonalists, diatonicists, minimalists, maximalists, microtonalists, fractalists, or quasianarchists (even John Cage chose to use the I Ching), before we get down to work there are decisions to be made and questions to be answered.