Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964-1976 brings together, for the first time, some 300 selections from the more than 2,000 reviews, essays, and features written by the eminent critic and musicologist Michael Steinberg during his dozen years--from 1964 to 1976--as music critic of the Boston Globe. Steinberg possessed a special gift in his ability to make complex aspects of music easy to understand, writing with a combination of wit, elegance, and passion that was inspiring to both amateurs and professionals. Eloquent and highly entertaining, his Globe writings inspired admiration and controversy for their exacting standards. The selections offered here serve as witness to some of the most important music and music-making of the time, in Boston and elsewhere.

This book will be of equal interest to a wide variety of concertgoers, music aficionados, record collectors, teachers, and students. At the same time, it is a valuable artifact of reception history and shows how pieces of music, whether familiar, unfamiliar, or newly created, were interpreted by artists and received by audiences and critics. Defending the Music also serves as a companion volume to existing compilations of Steinberg's work published by Oxford University Press.