to appreciate the wide stylistic variety of early avant-garde music

to understand Claude Debussy’s distance from the sounds and styles of late Romanticism

to follow the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic novelties of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring

to hear the breakdown of tonality in Arnold Schoenberg’s hallucinatory songs

to appreciate the power of post-Romantic, expressionist opera in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck

to track the course of an American avant-garde original, Charles Ives