The twentieth century - also called the "American century" by thousands of historians and artists around the world - has brought with it untold musical innovations: the popularization of ragtime and the blues, the birth and dissemination of jazz, gospel, and rock, the transmission via radio of music around the world, the transformation of sound recording from primitive cylinders and shellac disks to digital sound, the incorporation of film music into motion pictures, the rise (and decline) of twelve-tone techniques among American composers, the widespread use of music in advertising, the institution of programs that have made music education available to children throughout the United States. And so on. This book presents both the opinions of more than forty historians, theorists, composers, conductors, instrumentalists, singers, librarians, archivists, ethnomusicologists, music-business executives, schoolteachers, and experts of other kinds on the progress of music during the last hundred years and speculations by these individual son what may be in store for us in the opening decades of the "new millennium" and the twenty-first century.