Recently I went to a con­cert of new clas­si­cal works, pre­sented by an orga­ni­za­tion that typ­i­cally spe­cial­izes in the 18th– and 19th-century Euro­pean clas­sics. The host of the evening dis­cussed the con­text of the new works, pre­sum­ably to win over the more reluc­tant of their series sub­scribers. His argu­ment was along these lines: We can enjoy the great clas­sic works of the past because they were heard in their time; peo­ple learned to love them when they were new, the works became well known, and they entered the stan­dard reper­toire. We need to pro­gram new works, regard­less of if we like them or not, because this is how we cre­ate the clas­sics of the future.

As much as I wish this were a sound argu­ment, I think it is prob­lem­atic. I’ve also heard vari­a­tions on this theme many times before, so I thought I’d point out some of the issues:

• First of all, this argu­ment is usu­ally only lip ser­vice. The great works of the clas­si­cal period were heard and per­formed repeatedly—probably hun­dreds of times—before they started to make it into the col­lec­tive aware­ness. Mod­ern works in this same cat­e­gory are lucky to get a few dozen performances.
• Sec­ondly, it is only start­ing in the 19th cen­tury that an idea of “clas­sic” works evolved. This is a rel­a­tively mod­ern phe­nom­e­non that we have been able to do with­out for most of his­tory. Fur­ther­more, the obses­sion with col­lect­ing music from the past really only reached its full poten­tial with sound record­ings in the 20th cen­tury. Humans used to be per­fectly happy to for­get about the old and rein­vent new art for the present—in fact, this still hap­pens in much of pop­u­lar music.
• Given the recent appear­ance of the idea of “clas­sic”, there is no rea­son to assume that our gen­er­a­tion will pro­duce clas­sic works for the future. In fact, there is evi­dence to the con­trary. We have, for the first time in his­tory, a sit­u­a­tion in which our fun­da­men­tal cul­tural prob­lem is not acquir­ing art, but orga­niz­ing it. There is SO MUCH music out there, and it’s so easy to access, that there is a greatly dimin­ished need for more clas­sics. More likely is that society’s var­i­ous sub­groups have the mind­space for a cer­tain num­ber of clas­sic works that fit their self-image. This mind­space is largely filled in most areas, and will only be replaced by works that are supe­rior at build­ing self-image for that group than past works.
• Even if we do pro­duce clas­sics for the future, we are not likely to do so with art that is in styles that fail to reach audi­ences. This is not to say that new art needs to be pop­ulist or com­pro­mised, but it does need to com­mu­ni­cate some­thing unique and rel­e­vant in a way that can be under­stood by non-specialists with­out sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments of time spent study­ing. All of the clas­sics of the past fit this cat­e­gory. Mozart and Beethoven were edgy in their time, but still pop­u­lar. Even musi­cians like Schoen­berg and Stock­hausen man­aged to cul­ti­vate a degree of pop­u­lar appeal, because what they did was com­pletely unique at the time and held sig­nif­i­cant cul­tural value. Today, how­ever, we face dif­fer­ent cul­tural prob­lems (orga­ni­za­tion vs. access, for exam­ple), and If we are to have a chance at cre­at­ing new clas­sics, we need to address these issues in new ways. Fol­low­ing the 19th-century model of classics-building prob­a­bly won’t lead to great suc­cess. If it did, new works wouldn’t be such a hard sell and repeat per­for­mances of them would be more common.

It would be nice as com­posers to be able to sit back com­fort­ably and say that we have inher­ited the job of cre­at­ing the clas­sics of the future from the great musi­cians of the past. Such a posi­tion is a lit­tle sim­plis­tic, how­ever. Music is about cul­ture, and we need to find ways of deal­ing with the issues of today if we are to cre­ate rel­e­vant work. After all, clas­sics become clas­sics because they some­how touch the hearts and minds of a (rel­a­tively) large group of peo­ple in a pro­found way. And pro­found­ness doesn’t come from just doing things in the same old way.