No Practice More Damning

There is no practice more damning to the reputation and cultural presence of concert music than the insistence that the future must still be dominated by the long-held looming and illusory belief in the precedents of a supposed tradition so thinly contrived to be composed of a long-standing aesthetic line of evolving conventions from the ancients to the present day; through the dry mouths of musical pharisees, principles are propagated as unquestionable givens—motive, idea, development—as if the now perverted propositions of supposed musical prophets are to be taken as truths unchanging that we are to bear the mantle of upholding. And all this merely veiling the all-too-pervasive fear of history’s cerebral bite and the scarce lack of vibrance and artistic creativity endemic to the academic discipline of composition.