Drawn from the influential journal Perspectives of New Music, these essays reflect a variety of artistic viewpoints and critical perspectives. The contributors include composers Pierre Boulez, John Cage, and Milton Babbitt, literary scholar Douglas Collins, anthropologist Eric Gans, philosopher Michel Foucault, and poet Delmore Schwartz. The authors contemplate music's origins and function, the changing relations between music and society, the effects of today's conflicting aesthetic notions on composition, and the relationship between music and other communicative behaviors. Taken together, the essays suggest a working aesthetic that would ensure the continual renewal of artistic tradition in Western culture.