About the Series: Too often, both students and teachers get discouraged with contemporary compositions because of their avant-garde sound. This series addresses that concern by providing extellent music which is both contemporary and intuitively musical. Contemporary performance practices such as depressing keys silently, cluster chords, pedal effects, knocking on the keyboard, contemporary harmonies, jazz idioms, bitonality, modes, mixed and changing meters, and 12-tone techniques, challenge the student to listen for new rhythmic gestures and tonal colors, and expand their interpretative capacity. While the composers invited to write for this series use a colorful palette of contemporary techniques and textures, they were selected for their strong musical voices, which ensure that the ultimate goal of musical communication is never lost.