Finding ways to forge new syntheses and techniques for themselves through explorations and surprising reconciliations of tonal and post-tonal languages, the generation of American composers born in and around the year 1938 moved into the forefront of American classical music in the 1970s and ’80s.

At a formative time of their lives, the generation of American composers born in or near the year 1938 lived through an era of profound challenges to general beliefs about music and society.

To be born in 1938 meant straddling the two crises of the mid twentieth century (the Great Depression of the 1930s and the oncoming Second World War of the 1940s), but most composers born at that time were too young in the War years to remember much about this era.