Designed to serve music students at the college level, this informal approach to music theory relates the technical aspects of music with the expressive character of the art. The approach is holistic in the sense that it focuses on the inter-relationships between the piece as heard by a socially conditioned listener and the notated, performed score. The composers addressed are: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Debussy and Schoenberg. There are separate chapters on the problems of meaning in music and on the interdependence of aesthetic and ethical value-judgements. This approach to music theory should be a welcome addition to the musical analysis literature.