Besides legality, most scanned PDFs from the 1990s are unreadable. They have crooked pages, missing examples, and smudged notation. The official digital edition is pristine and worth the investment.
Slonimsky was fascinated by the outer limits of tonality. While his contemporaries were debating the merits of serialism (12-tone rows), Slonimsky was looking for a way to organize pitch material that retained the expressive power of tonality while expanding its vocabulary exponentially. He was not a jazz musician; he was a classical modernist. Yet, his work would find its most fervent adopters in the world of bebop and post-bop jazz. Besides legality, most scanned PDFs from the 1990s