Kinder!, macht Neues!

In an article by composer Annie Gosfield written for The New York Times's Opinionator's The Score column, we were struck particularly by this graf:

When I first moved to New York, a friend and colleague proudly announced to me that he no longer played experimental music. He was a great improviser who coaxed wild sounds out of his instrument, but he was content with where his work had led him, so he stopped exploring. I found it both funny and disturbing — here was a guy who was willing to get on stage and work his way through a strange vocabulary of very original sounds. Why would he give up experimenting? It convinced me to keep turning over rocks to see what kind of musical wildlife I could uncover in the dirt, and to avoid getting comfortable with any single approach or style. Sometimes it means experimenting with a new sound, technique, or combination of instruments, or investigating a way to express myself while writing for a more traditionally trained group of musicians. I’ve managed to strike a balance between having enough confidence in my own music to develop my own sound, but enough curiosity and restlessness to continue to change it. If there’s a formula to writing music, I haven’t found it, and I hope I never do.

What struck us was its almost verbatim echo of sentiment of these famous grafs by Richard Wagner in an 1852 letter to Franz Liszt the closing exhortation of which is invariably quoted out of context by Eurotrash Regies to justify their grotesque outrages in the staging of Wagner's music-dramas:

How about [composer, Joachim] Raff? I thought he was writing a new work, but no; he is remodeling an old one. Is there no LIFE in these people? Out of what can the artist create if he does not create out of life, and how can this life contain an artistically productive essence unless it impels the artist continually to creations which correspond to life? Is this artificial remodeling of old motives of life real artistic creativeness? How about the source of all art unless new things flow forth from it irresistibly, unless it is wholly absorbed in new creations? Oh, ye creatures of God, do not think that this making is artistic creating. It betrays no end of self-complacency, combined with poverty, if we try to prop up these earlier attempts.

[...]

Children!, do something new!, new!, and once again new! [Kinder!, macht Neues!, Neues!, und abermals Neues!]. If you stick to the old, the devil of barrenness holds you in thrall, and you are the most miserable of artists.

As true today — and will be tomorrow — as it was a century and a half ago and before.