Denis Fodor:

>The ingenious thing here is that it comes to the core of the problem,
>namely that there's a warp between these two kinds of music.  This has
>been accorded recognition in the fine arts, where we now go to the
>Guggenheim to enjoy the modern and to the Uffizzi to enjoy the classical
>canon.

Substitute The Museum of Modern Art for the Guggenheim and you're on,
as far as the fine arts are concerned.  MOMA has a permanent collection
and the last I noticed was considering making it a closed collection,
in effect a canon of modernist art.  With the performing arts there are
certainly stylistic breaks, often paralleling the styles in the visual arts
(Impressionism and Expressionism, for instance).  But in music, although
there are early music groups and new music groups, (typically chamber
ensembles) the main venue for, say, orchestral music is the concert hall
and the standard repertoire there is so fluid that I honestly don't know
what you think the boundaries of your "received canon" are.  The standard
repertoire certainly includes the early Stravinsky ballets and Bartok's
(2nd) Violin Concerto, Sibelius' Violin Concerto, some Shostakovich, etc.
By the way, decades ago I attended a summer concert at Lewisohn Stadium
in New York (long gone), the program of which had promised Brahms' First
symphony.  Just before the downbeat, the conductor turned to the audience
and asked if we would rather hear the Shostakovich Fifth.  There was strong
applause.  (Guess what music was on the stands?) Again, in Green Bay, of
all places, after a symphony concert which included Hovhaness' Floating
World (which has an aleatoric passage which was pretty chaotic) the
conductor asked if wanted to hear Floating World AGAIN, with a similar
response.

Jim Tobin