Achim Breiling responds to Jocelyn Wang and Stephen Heersink:

>What do they expect a contemporary or 20th century composer (as I have the
>impression they like to mix all this music together as atonal) to compose?

I don't see what they could have said to give you this impression.  There's
a lot of 20th century music, much of it sounding not at all like hard-core
dodecaphonic serialism.  Ms.  Wang, in fact, runs a 20th-century music
series filled with works that don't sound like Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler,
or Tchaikovsky.  I think it's quite clear that dodecaphonic serialism isn't
everybody's cup of Postum.

The only thing I object to is that Ms.  Wang, at least, treats "atonal"
music in a different way than she treats any other kind of music - that,
for her, it constitutes a special case, beyond her simply not caring for
it.  She demonizes it and grants its practitioners as much power (They've
Driven Away Listeners from Classical Music!  They Have Destroyed Beauty!)
as the most extreme of those practitioners would have granted themselves.

Thirty years ago, these kinds of claims (from both sides of the argument)
were normal.  Now, they're simply quaint, in the category of the Wagnerian
vs.  Brahminen fights of the 19th century.  Did Wagner really destroy
musical beauty? Did Brahms halt all by himself the Progress of Music?
Probably not, but don't these questions seem at least odd now? Stirling
Newberry hits the nail on the head when he says all sorts of composers are
free to use Schoenberg's procedures or leave them alone, just as they're
free to use species counterpoint, if they want.  To most composers,
particularly younger composers, the procedures imply no polemical bent.
They simply allow a certain kind of musical expression.

Steve Schwartz