A brilliant narrative allows us to experience the history of the 20th century anew through its music. Alex Ross, a critic for The New Yorker, takes us from Vienna and Graz on the eve of World War I to the Paris and Berlin of the Roaring Twenties, from Hitler's Germany through Russia to America in the 1960s and 70s. He guides us through a labyrinthine realm, from Sibelius to Lou Reed, from Mahler to Björk. And we follow the rise of mass culture as well as the politics of the masses, the dramatic changes brought about by new technologies, as well as the wars, experiments, revolutions, and uprisings of the past hundred years.