In response to Bernard Chasan's question:

>>Haydn and Mozart did eighteenth century music on the highest level.
>>Why should any creative and ambitious soul go there again.?

Len Fehskens writes:

>Perhaps because that world was large enough that even the two of them,
>undeniably great as they were, did not exhaust it?

Wasn't that sort of what neoclassicism was about? Isn't that what Harold
Shapero was doing in a sense? Or Prokofiev? Of course, the composers of
the 20th century did not simply mimic the style and technique of their
predecessors.  They brought their own sensibilities, and incorporated what
had gone on in music since the end of the 18th century.  To me, it makes no
more sense for a modern composer to try and emulate 200-year-old music than
it would make sense for a playwright to write about human passion in the
style of Shakespeare or a painter to depict scenes of modern middle class
life by faithful replication of the Dutch old masters.

I would not find it particularly interesting to hear the music of a modern
composer that I could not distinguish from that of Haydn or Mozart or
Beethoven or Brahms, but I appreciate the elements of that earlier music
set within a modern context.

Regards,

John Parker