In the 1920s, not only the world but also music and musical life are thrown into turmoil: between crisis and war, isolation and exchange, the resigned gaze back and new dynamics. The year 1923 illustrates how closely music and society are intertwined. It is marked by events, debates, and developments that still concern us today. In the occupied Ruhr area, music becomes a means of political struggle; in the hyperinflation-ravaged Weimar Republic, the crisis of concert life intensifies, and ticket prices rise to 200 billion marks in the autumn; in the USA, African American blues and jazz greats like Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong make their first record recordings as part of the so-called "race records"; in Vienna, Arnold Schönberg completes his first twelve-tone works; in Paris, Igor Stravinsky shocks the avant-garde with his neoclassical wind octet; and in Budapest, Béla Bartók makes a musical statement against nationalism with his dance suite. In Berlin's Voxhaus, the broadcasting of the first radio hour marks the beginning of the public broadcasting era in Germany at the height of the political and economic crisis. Tobias Bleek's book fascinatingly narrates how music is embedded in the cultural, social, and political life of this year of extremes.