The focus of this collection, essays originally published in the journal "19th-Century Music, is upon modernism in relation to its immediate heritage. Major composers whose reflections on the past come under consideration include Debussy, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, and Ives, while older composers such as Liszt and Wolf figure as precursors of modernist harmony and sensibility. The contributors include many leading musicologists, critics, and music theorists known for their work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Some of the essays deal closely with the new musical languages that evolved in that era; others deal with reception and performance issues. Many of them bring together insights from various subdisciplines to achieve a richer kind of composite scholarship than is available to traditional musical studies.