Rather than talk about what's going to survive from this century, since
I won't be around to see what will survive, I'd like to talk about the
composers and trends I find the most influential.

The transitionals include the two great figures of Elgar and Mahler.
Elgar's influence has been confined mainly to Britain, while Mahler's has
been more widespread.  I would judge that our present conceptions of what
a symphony is and how it proceeds owes much to Mahler.

The loosening of tonality:  Debussy, Strauss, and Schoenberg.  Both
composers come from essentially a post-Wagnerian point of view but arrive
at different places.  Debussy ultimately is the great sensualist - in that
he is concerned mainly with the information of the senses.  Schoenberg is
the guy who tries to fit expanded tonality into traditional structures.
I think he's to the 20th century as Beethoven and Brahms were to the 19th.
We don't normally think of Strauss in this regard, but Elektra is probably
as radical a piece - so far as tonality goes - as anything by Schoenberg.

Stravinsky.  Influenced by Debussy among others, a composer who opened up
two great avenues:  barbarism and neoclassicism.  The great ironist and
creator of masks of 20th-century musicians.  French music and American
music in this century would be hard to imagine without him.

Hindemith.  A great influence between the wars, not much after World War
II.  A different approach to neoclassicism than Stravinsky's.  Rather than
treating baroque and classical structures ironically or elliptically, he
took them pretty much straight, creating music with a monumental,
Apollonian quality.

The nationalists include Sibelius, Bartok, Shostakovich, and Vaughan
Williams, among others.  Bartok had the greatest influence in Eastern
Europe, particularly in Hungary (natch) and Poland.  He also had followers
around the world, even in such places as South and Central America.
Sibelius found very fruitful influence among the British.  Like van Gogh,
Vaughan Williams seems to have had very little influence at all, but in
my opinion, he's a massive artistic figure, standing for the individual
composer free from allegiance to any one school.

The radicals.  Ives, Varese, Ruggles, Seeger, Webern, Crumb.  Varese
especially had a compulsion to begin from scratch with every piece.
Perhaps that's why he didn't write that much.  All of these folks had
a vision of music completely different from anything in their time.

Satie and the circus.  Satie created a music in which, as in Webern, less
was more.  Unlike Webern, a mystic who seems to want to shed the bonds of
earth, Satie keeps a human connection, through humor, through a refusal to
reject any raw musical material as "unclean," through a fundamentally sane
perspective on art, and through an insight into the miracle of the
everyday.

Jazz and points east.  The big-name minimalists, at any rate, learn much
from Africa and Bali.  Jazz hasn't been fully realized in classical music,
but for many American composers, at any rate, jazz has influenced rhythmic
conceptions.  Bernstein pointed out at 60 years ago that the rhythms
Copland - even in his non-jazz works - came up with would have been
inconceivable to someone who hadn't heard jazz a lot.  The so-called Holy
Minimalists of the Baltic do something else, which I trace to Stravinsky's
Mass and which has a lot to do with Russian Orthodox music and with
plainchant.

As to what will survive, I have no idea, but I think historians focusing
on our time will have to at least consider these points.

Steve Schwartz