American composers are at the crossroads—at an intersection of three roads, the serial, the neo-baroque and that of the intransigent avant-garde. The serial road, in the Schoenbergian direction, is rapidly growing over with cryptochromatic weeds. The neo-baroque road has been polluted beyond recovery by Stravinsky's acolytes. As to the third road, it has become an Escher print, in which giant ants are twisted on a Möbius strip, with the vistas literally ‘far-out’.