Tippet on Music expands essays from Michael Tippett's two previous collections, Moving into Aquarius and Music of the Angels, to make a fresh, up-to-date compilation. It also includes a substantial amount of new material. Altough its framing chapters deal with aesthetics and the role of the artist in society, the core of the book is to do with music by other twentieth-century composers, and above all Tippett's own major works, from his early popular success, the oratorio A Child of our Time, up to the very latest, such as the opera New Year and the orchestral piece The Rose Lake. A whole section is devoted to the questions of interpretation and performance, and as such it should be particularly useful to performers, conductors and opera directors. Tippett on Music distils the intellectual opinions and artistic experience of an internationally celebrated composer, one whose life-span has stretched through almost the whole of the twentieth century, and whose compositional output has remained consistent and challenging, right into his late eighties. The book ends with a glimpse of what Tippett thinks commposers could achieve in the next millenium.