In contemporary music and particularly in organ art (because organists tend to be more conservative than other musicians) many still have the idea that compositions from the 20th century are innovative. They forget that we live in 2016 and that Messiaen, Stockhausen, Boulez, Ligeti, Xenakis, Nono, Berio, Cage and others belong to the past and are part of music history. I happen to be teaching about works by Stockhausen (Punkte, Kontra-Punkte, Gruppen, Kontakte, Refrain) at Rotterdam Conservatoire and it surprises me how students respond to these classics of the ‘50s and early ‘60s as typically belonging to a distant past.
I do not write pun this as an outsider, as even before entering the conservatory I had heard Stockhausen’s oeuvre till Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and later studied organ works of Messiaen, Ligeti, Berio and Cage. Among these Messiaen’s works stand out as a monument of the 20th century. Still, they belong to the past and cannot be considered as innovative. In the late ’90s I stopped playing Ligeti, Berio and Cage as I found them outdated and not interesting anymore.
