"Joan Peyser has long maintained that the debt the world of present-day music owes to Arnold Schoenberg is incalculable. ... [W]hile those who know the world of twentieth-century music have no doubt about the crucial importance of Schoenberg's contribution, the larger 'music-loving' public has (especially in recent years) been consistently misled by journalists about his music. They have been told repeatedly that his work was a 'mistake,' that their own conservative tastes embody truths about the eternal nature of music, and that Schoenberg the composer, thinker, and moral force in music is disappearing. With her unique combination of journalistic skill and musical sophistication, Joan Peyser has managed to stand against this knownothingism in exactly the same forum in which it has been promulgated. We are all in her debt."
-- From Charles Wuorinen's Foreword to Peyser's 1999 book To Boulez and Beyond: music in Europe since the Rite of Spring.
