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