This is a book about new American music as it really is. Music s<br >range has always reached from the complicated to the simple， from<br >cathedrals and concert halls to fields and streets. In America today，<br >the diversity seems greater than ever. Yet even as the separate styles<br >maintain their vitality， they are also coming together in subtle and<br >unexpected ways. That can be perplexing and disturbing， but it<br >can also be enormously exciting. Music in the late twentieth century<br >exists on myriad levels of technical complexity， historical tradi-<br >tion， technological discovery and hybrid interaction. And no culture<br >in the world has a richer confluence of these cross-currents than<br >the United States， where the old battles about what is European<br >and what is American， what is popular and what is "serious，" are<br >being fought with a new fierceness--and resolved with a new<br >confidence.<br >