Nicholas Roberts relates a question from one of his students:

>Sir We've got all these periods of music Renaissance Baroque Classical
>etc.  We've called music from L'apres midi d'un faune Modern but now
>in the 21st century what should we call it?

You could tell the student that it didn't make much sense to call Debussy's
"Faun" modern fifty years ago, never mind in the 21st century.  It could be
called "Impressionist" music, but that notion has been crushed in recent
decades.  How about - a Debussy work from the last decade of the 19th
century?

This categorization of music is going to be in for a rough time.  When
someone tells me he hates baroque music, I know what he's talking about and
it covers well over 100 years.  If someone told me he hated 20th century
music, I wouldn't know what he was referring to.  The 20th century has
ushered in a much greater diversity and number of musical styles than ever
before.  And it happens in 'Pop" music as well.

In the past, we could collect the music from a large time period and give
it some type of collective and descriptive term.  With the greater and more
extreme varieties of style now with us, this is impossible.  I think that
categories matching time with style are becoming meaningless.  It's time to
simply divide the categories up by specific style alone, and this has been
happening both on the classical and pop fronts.

If the "Helicopter" work of Stockhausen catches on with other composers,
folks from future generations could call this particular venue "Helicopter
Music".  However these categories are resolved, I hope that the goal will
be to use categorial references which enhance the communication and
understanding between and among individuals.  We tried on the List to do
this with the definition of music but ended up with zero resolution; we
couldn't even agree on any milestones.  Although the lack of resolution
could have been predicted, it still is a negative when it comes to trying
to figure out what others have on their minds.

Don Satz