The second wave of avant-garde composers after World War II questioned the traditional features of music in more basic ways than any other generation in European history. But they did not, on the whole, succeed in convincing concert-going audiences to explore these questions with them.

By the 1950s, the concert hall and opera house resounded with a familiar series of established works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a healthy dose of twentieth-century works of traditional cast and a few early avant-garde classics (such as The Rite of Spring and Wozzeck) added into the mix. The works of the second avant-garde wave, instead, tended to be performed in small university halls and at occasional new-music festivals. One arch-modernist composer of the 1950s, Milton Babbitt, wrote an essay about the situation. He proclaimed that the new music could thrive only in the university, and he patiently explained why no listener without specialized musical training should hope to understand it. Babbitt’s publisher gave the essay the inflammatory title “Who Cares If You Listen?”

But by the late 1960s many composers began to tire of the difficulty and elitism, as some said, of avant-garde music. New styles emerged that communicated more directly and openly with listeners and renounced the complications of some avant-garde styles.

In a way, composers forging these styles (like the non-avant-gardists of the 1930s) enjoyed the best of both worlds. They could freely exploit whatever musical resources they wanted to, all the while referring back to earlier, more accessible modes of expression.