The author, director of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, wrote about music of all kinds for The New York Times for twenty years. Here he delineates the heritage, actuality, and potential of American music, demonstrating not only the possibility but the necessity of dealing with artists as seemingly unrelated as Elliott Carter and David Byrne, Milton Babbitt and Laurie Anderson, John Cage and Neil Young, Philip Glass and Ornette Coleman. In twenty chapters that each bring to life the work of a specific composer, Rockwell tells the whole story of American musical composition in our time.