[rolfea]

post-Cage I think it's gotten a bit hard to pin down what it means to be a significant contributor to "Western art music." How do you define that? Has Glass been influential (yes), popular (yes), and tried things compositionally that others hadn't (arguable). Is Steve Reich's music "better"? I think so, both as a listener and a performer, but Glass being potentially more popular doesn't really do any harm to anything. It just is what it is.

But I've had as many (and honestly, more) arguments with "anti-contemporary music/art" folks about Berio and Feldman, for example. What is late Feldman doing compositionally? Just shifting around simple chords surrounded by loads of silence while stuffy audiences in turtlenecks nod sagely and compose tweets in their mind for later about how "serene and haunting" this performance was? (I love Feldman, for the record)