Music in the Modern Age (Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music) (Book Review‪)‬

Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, by Robert R. Reilly, Washington, D.C.: Morley Books, 2002. 351 pp. IN HIS GENEROUS AND beautifully written book, Robert Reilly leads us through the vast, largely unknown territory of twentieth-century music. The title recalls C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy and the poem of the same name by William Wordsworth. The hero of the book is beauty. We are surprised by beauty--surprised because beauty in all its forms surpasses expectation and provokes wonder, and because the beautiful in music somehow managed not just to exist, but even to thrive in a century marked by brutal political ideologies and perverse intellectualism.