Beethoven and the Future

As I prepare to record some Beethoven chamber music, I'm honestly even more terrified of the long-term impact on my profession of the current ideological climate than of that of the pandemic, as bad as the latter is. I became a professional musician because I love music that happens to have been written primarily by European men prior to about 1945, with a few later exceptions. That's what speaks to me. And I refuse to apologize for that. My brother tells me that he saw an alleged musician say online somewhere that everything from before 1945 should be "cancelled." I'm not capable of responding to such malignant idiocy in a calm and reasonable way and do not believe that statements like that even deserve a serious response.

It is commendable for living composers to try to create tonal music that people will like. But I believe there is a reason, though not necessarily an insurmountable one, why most fans of classical music connect more with music by long-dead composers. The European society of the 18th and 19th centuries (despite the sinister interruption of the French Revolution) when most of what we now call the standard repertoire was written was basically a healthier society than ours. I see the modern world as a fundamentally sick society so am not surprised that it doesn’t produce much new of value. The circumstances conducive to the creation of “Great” secular instrumental music didn’t really exist before c. 1600 either, so there’s no guarantee that they always will. All I ask at this point is that we be allowed to hang on to as much of the past as we can, rather like tending the remnants of what used to be a roaring fire 🔥 so that it doesn’t entirely burn out.
 
Even when liberals (often under attack from those even further to their Left) defend the legacies of pre-20th-century European culture that they personally like, they tend to so in an apologetic way that implicitly concedes something like, "yes, of course they were wrong about a bunch of stuff back then and our modern secular democratic egalitarian values are totally superior, but there were still some worthwhile achievements we can benefit from." But that's not what I believe. I believe that the values of the European past, when most of the music I love was composed, were in many ways superior, and that's why the music, art, literature, and architecture were better. And for those problems that did exist, the proper solution was always reform, never revolution.