Len Fehskens, in reply to me:

>And is this not the case today as well?

Well, no.  The point I was trying to make is that a hundred years ago
anyone who took an interest in classical music would be aware who the
major composers of the recent past were, but that the same could not be
said today.  I believe this to be the case, the anecdotal evidence seems
to support my belieef, without trying all that hard I can provide one small
piece of documentary evidence (not of course decisive on its own) which
also supports it, and I know of no hard evidence which contradicts it.

>There's a great deal written spoken about contemporary music if one is
>willing to look for it.

Agreed.  Most of the writings disagree with one another, not only about
what they approve of, but about who's important.  That's my point.

(To illustrate the distinction:  the Brahms faction might not have approved
of the Wagner faction, and vice versa, but they knew it was important, or
they wouldn't have been so vociferous.)

It might be the case that 20th-century music is so diverse that there can't
possibly be any agreement about who is important.  It might also be the
case (and I think it is) that of people who take an interest in classical
music, a far higher proportion nowadays just don't listen to music of the
last few decades regularly than was the case a hundred years ago.

>That availability implies nothing whatsoever about how widespread that
>knowledge is.  One might extrapolate from your conclusion that a century
>from now, sociomusicologists will conclude that this was a golden age for
>contemporary composers, because of the enormous amount of their music
>available on CD.

Would that it were.  Some of it is `available on CD' to the extent that
an obscure label might run off half-a-dozen copies before deleting it.
I assume that's your point, and I think it reinforces what I wrote, not
contradicts it.

Peter Varley
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