Contemporary music has a reputation for being complicated, inharmonious, and hermetic for anyone who doesn’t know the codes. In a nutshell: elitist and pretentious.

Yet there is another musical twentieth century that make room for pleasure and emotion. It is a century of music that rests on refined craftsmanship; rejects the Modernists’ insistence on purity – they were so taken by theory, and refuses to bend to abstract rules.

In this book, Karol Beffa, one of the great living French composers, reveals his personal pantheon, which includes Maurice Ravel, Richard Strauss, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Nadia Boulanger, Francis Poulenc, Steve Reich,?John Adams, Vladimir Cosma and others.

From pieces that are so well known that we hardly really hear them any more (like Ravel’s Bolero) to film scores, via the American Minimalists’ pranks, Karol Beffa introduces us, in an accessible yet thoughtful tone, to his other musical twentieth century.