Interesting thought bubbling-up: the 'old composers' whose works make-up the bulk of concert life programs, are not old, but young, simply because they came earlier. On the level of musical language and its possibilities, so much could still be discovered since Monteverdi, and how wise that he kept the 'prima pratica' - the then usual polyphonic style - as a language next to, and as important as, the 'seconda pratica' which he helped develop himself, with monody and expressive harmonic underpinning. And of course these two styles could be combined or used as alternation within a single work.
The youthfulness of Monteverdi's music, in either pratica, is due to the composer's enormous musical talent, but also to the feeling underneath of exploring new territory and making discoveries all the time.
Nowadays it seems that all possibilites in terms of musical language have been exhausted: everything is possible, anything goes, and entirely distinct from any question of meaning, value or aestheticism. This situation looks similar to the 'state of the art' in the contemporary visual arts. But there, it is in the field of new figurative or realist art, that a youthful freshness sometimes can be felt. Similarly, 'new classical architecture' shows fresh invention, although often still quite hesitatingly. In music, exploring the treasure trove of the past, which is in fact very young, seems to offer new ways out of the stalemate that new music in the last century has created, which may revive the creative spirit that is still enlightening so many listening souls through works from the eternally young past, and which may regain as contemporary music the interest and the status in concert life it once had.
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