The great stylistic diversity of the music written during the twentieth century (and beyond) would seem to make the organization of any conference devoted to it a formidable task: can one really hope to cover a representative selection? While a decade ago such an event might well have covered only art music (a disparate enough field in itself), nowadays one would expect to see some attention given to jazz, popular music, and film. The organizers of the Third Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music at the University of Nottingham made a conscious attempt at inclusivity, selecting papers that might have been better put together under the title of ‘Twentieth-Century Musics’. The diversity of music represented by the papers was reflected in the plurality of approaches and methodologies. Indeed, one central feature of the conference was its concern not only with musical works, or with twentieth-century composers, but with musical practices. Alongside the statutory selection of more or less canonical art composers and their music, there were several sessions on popular music, jazz, and perspectives from ethnomusicology.