ABSTRACT
We have, as yet, no descriptive term such as Romantic or Baroque for the music of this century. As words, modern and postmodern give us no information beyond rough chronology, and even that depends on the particular speaker or writer. We do have a number of terms describing general currents in the mainstream of twentieth-century music-neoclassical, neoromantic, nationalistic, and so on-as well as some that purport to describe more specific compositional or technical characteristics-serial and postserial, aleatoric, and even tonal and atonal. None of these is particularly satisfactory, because none adequately represents the complexities of the repertory.
