ABSTRACT
CR: Conversations of the sort we’re having always include a ritual question, or rather a double question, on the present state and the future of music. And I fully intend to ask it. The question is this: ‘In your view, what is the present state of music and where is it heading?’ But I’d also like to complicate the game with a bit more detail, the reason being that some months ago I had a conversation with one of your older colleagues, the doyen of the contemporary French school, Florent Schmitt. We were talking about ‘progress’ in music. I was enquiring about the evolution of music in general and of twentieth-century music in particular, and he gave me one of his characteristic answers, halfway between the serious and the witty, saying that music had made no progress (worthy of the name) since 1900 … But the precise reason I asked him this question was my opinion that the half-century we’ve just been living through has been one of the richest, from the ‘progress’ point of view, in the whole history of music.
