At first acquaintance, the music of Arthur Berger (b. New York, May 15, 1912) presents a perplexing assortment of styles, which leads one to wonder just who he is. Is he the American neo-classicist, a disciple of Aaron Copland, writing music full of slightly jazzy, Broadwayish licks and cowboy tunes? Is he the dean of American composers? Or is he the composer of austere post-serial works? Once one establishes to one's satisfaction that all these styles are represented in his repertory, one is left to contemplate how the composer came to write in so many different styles. Even when one attempts to fit Arthur Berger into the stylistic development of twentieth-century music, that does not completely clarify the picture. A cynical observer might see him as a neo-classical composer when Stravinsky and Copland were fashionable, a serial composer when the university music department was the place for the with-it composer to be (when everybody was writing music), or as a composer of fragmentary, skillfully academic pieces at a time when the twelve-tone thing waned, and nobody much cared anyway. Where, the cynic might ask, is the integrity of the music?