John Adams at the New York Times:
In 1955 Henry Pleasants, a critic of both popular and classical music, issued a cranky screed of a book, “The Agony of Modern Music,” which opened with the implacable verdict that “serious music is a dead art.” Pleasants’s thesis was that the traditional forms of classical music — opera, oratorio, orchestral and chamber music, all constructions of a bygone era — no longer related to the experience of our modern lives. Composers had lost touch with the currents of popular taste, and popular music, with its vitality and its connection to the spirit of the times, had dethroned the classics. Absent the mass appeal enjoyed by past masters like Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner and Tchaikovsky, modern composers had retreated into obscurantism, condemned to a futile search for novelty amid the detritus of a tradition that was, like overworked soil, exhausted and fallow. One could still love classical music, but only with the awareness that it was a relic of the past and in no way representative of our contemporary experience.
more here.