The full story of 20th-century music has yet to be told disinterestedly. Every writer — composer, commentator, historian — has an axe to grind, often unwitting. Time does its work of pure ablution; the merely worthless slowly sinks beneath the horizon. But what then happens, it seems, is that we're left only with the huge grim important Easter Island figures of the great pioneers. Such Academy- or ‘History’-hallowed idolatry, tremendously impressive, is difficult to resist, and tends to demote any music that doesn't accord to the accompanying ideology, denaturing a richer understanding of the whole. Art isn't so clear-cut. Any attempts to make it so are simply not true. The true story of what is distinctive, valuable, permanent, in the last romantics, the moderns, the neo-classicists, serialists, constructivists, folklorists, neo-romantics, minimalists, neo-tonalists, neo-moderns, post-moderns of the past 100 years or so — the huge span remains discrete because we're still so hugely involved in every phase of it; it's still being digested — will need vast efforts of listening and assimilation, evaluation and revaluation, to amount eventually by thousands of individual small siftings and shiftings to a complete re-alignment of the field. Probably the main patterns as currently received are not all that far out: certainly we will be able to agree upon some seminal masterpieces without risking the dogmatic claustrophobia of Boulez's recent concert-programming. But what must yield is the very idea of main lines only, and only the main lines permitted, admirable, right — so deceptively definite, so crudely black/white, so cruelly denuded of detail.
