ABSTRACT
A dispassionate and therefore disembodied observer might find the contemporary scene in the creative arts tantalizing beyond his understanding: that Americans require and will pay for new plays, new books, new architecture, even new art now and then, but require only old music, or “new” music that sounds like old music. (“It has to sound like something, doesn’t it—Haydn, Mendelssohn, Gershwin—in order to mean anything?”)
