My belief that the crisis in 20th-century music, particularly that part which directly derives from the work of the composers of the Second Viennese School, is the result of a crisis in the theme and forms, meaning that it is a situation related to the processes of composition itself and not to the audience, began to take shape in the mid-1980s.

At the same time, my experience as both a musicologist and a composer regarding 20th-century music, particularly the movements of the 1950s and 1960s, led me to the conclusion that the musical creation of recent years could not be understood without examining the problems directly arising from the musical expressionism and twelve-tone technique of the early part of the century.

These problems mainly concerned the dissolution of the theme, considered as an indivisible melodic-harmonic-rhythmic unity, as well as the resulting dissolution of the corresponding classical forms.

In the texts of this book, on the one hand, the trajectory from the dissolution-crisis of the theme and forms to the crisis of musical creation itself is outlined as it became more pronounced from the 1950s onwards, and on the other hand, an attempt is made to locate the origins of this crisis primarily at the musicological level and secondarily at the philosophical-aesthetic level through the analysis of specific works by Schonberg, Berg, and Webern.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]