The musical world of the twentieth century is a divided world. None of the dreams and expectations of enthusiastic minds at the beginning of the twentieth century has been fulfilled. In our new society an old nucleus has persisted, with its own customs and imagination stemming directly from concepts rooted in the nineteenth century.

Worldwide social revolutions, a series of unbelievable and radical scientific discoveries, entirely new views concerning almost every field of life, and different generations of composers and performers, scholars and technicians have not succeeded in preventing the official music world from revolving, and continuing to revolve, around a very definite period of the past with a span of scarcely two hundred years.

This historical heritage is in itself a strange amalgam of a number of brilliant masterpieces alongside musical follies as numerous as they are popular, of – broadly speaking – an exceptionally high level of performance, and of related musical theory developed to a similar degree. This is coupled, on the other hand, to a most rudimentary musical aesthetic, characterised by entirely bourgeois, romantic concepts which continue to rule our democratised musical life as a mere imitation of what was once – in the nineteenth century – a living and authentic intellectual movement.

The contemporary creative artist can hardly function in such a musical practice. The public at large that fills our concert halls has become both anonymous and amorphous. It has no need of nor does it make demands upon creative contemporaries. The small and select social groups that determined European artistic life until far into the eighteenth century are no longer; the so essential interaction between creator and receiver has therefore disappeared. Through the lack of any collective stimulus, only the most vital of individuals are able to maintain contact with contemporary art. The enjoyment of music has become a strictly individual matter, just like composition. The disinclination to regard oneself as a revolutionary is typical of many modern composers. Stravinsky, in his conversations with Robert Craft, claimed that he could not imagine that his music could sound strange to the public.