Bob Draper replies to Keith Gerling:

>>I've read your posting several times, and I finally have to admit I'm not
>>sure of your point.  It seems as if you're suggesting that music has run
>>out of possibilities; that there are no new areas to be explored.  I think
>>you're mistaken.
>
>That is exactly what I am suggesting.  I can't see much original coming up
>in the way of new forms.  But sure there is plenty of scope to experiment
>with existing forms.  By form here I mean romanticism for example.

Consider this.  At the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th,
most writers, painters, and composers felt themselves in crisis - that it
had all been done and there was nowhere left to go.  This was just before
one of the greatest eras of innovation in Western culture.  In a sense,
they were right.  The inherited language and forms alone were no longer
fruitful.  No one was going to write a Brahms fifth, for example, or a
Tchaikovsky seventh or eighth.  Now, it's the High Modern/Postmodern ethos
that seems played out, and composers are casting about for something else.
I have no idea what that something else will be, but I don't doubt it will
come.  That's what geniuses are for.

Steve Schwartz