Walter Meyer: >... But weren't most of the works from earlier years that are popular >today already popular when they were written? Taking just this century, >the works Stravinsky, Bartok, Shostakovich, Prokoffiev, Debussy, Ravel, >and other "modern" composers that have been mentioned, were known and >appreciated pretty much as soon as they were written, even if they also >had contemporary detractors. They didn't have to "grow" on the musical >public's taste. Again, this all depends on whom you consider the public. I could name works by all of these folks that even people who listen to classical music put down, and the audience has had a while to digest such works. The idea that genius is recognized in its time is a comforting half-truth. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Most of the time, most modern music doesn't even show up on the radar of a good number of classical music listeners. It isn't all that hard to come up with a list of 20th-century composers that few of us - including me - have heard of. Steve Schwartz