In 1990s Los Angeles, composer and professor Simon Grafton uncovers a lost manuscript that suggests unknown links between two composers he idolizes, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, a find that could make his career-if his obsession doesn't destroy him and his family first. Interwoven into the story is the sometimes-tortured friendship between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, as it unfolds in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, through the war years, and then in Los Angeles during Hollywood's Golden Era, when modern music's dissonant experiments outraged the public before entering the mainstream, used and abused by Hollywood. Music is at the heart of the novel, and our ways of breaking convention while trying to hold on those we love.