Thoughts for the Future

Extract

The obsession with the Millenium was doubtless inevitable. It is certainly inescapable. None of us can avoid introducing catch phrases like ‘the new century that awaits us’ or ‘as we move into the new century’ into what we write or speak: we've been conditioned so to do. It is tempting of course to take stock from time to time and reassess how reputations stand, of individuals, of institutions, of movements in the arts. I have lived long enough myself to have witnessed the post-war ascendance of Modernism and the more recent arrival on the scene of Post-Modernism. More specifically, Mahler has been brought in out of the cold and enjoyed a triumph, the global scale of which, even at my most incautiously optimistic, I could never have predicted; and sure enough there are today stirrings here and there, of what my old friend Hans Keller might have spelled out as ‘resistances’ to Mahler's music, couched in terms that risibly arouse memories of the stone-age (stone-deaf) opinions of Eric Blom or Frank Howes, not to speak of Vaughan Williams's immortal judgment: ‘… Intimate acquaintance with the executive side of music made even [sic] Mahler a very tolerable imitation of a composer’.