Being a classical music fan induces a peculiar sense of history. If you love fine paintings or theater or literature, you may encounter something similar.
I found some of this being stirred up while sitting through a concert where Debussy was the oldest music performed. He was still considered “modern” when I began attending concerts in 1959 or so. He died in 1918, shortly before my parents were born. Not that far back, then.
For additional perspective, some major Romantic-era composers like Tchaikovsky, who died in 1893, or Saint-Saens, 1923, or Puccini, 1924, weren’t all that distant from me at the time, though it seemed they were much more ancient, say closer to Mozart. The span between them and me at the time would fit into my own life now.
I do recall hearing a live performance of the Tchaikovsky fourth symphony under Lukas Foss and the Buffalo Philharmonic and during the rapturous applause afterward have the gentleman sitting beside me lean over and say, “You should have heard it under Reiner in Cincinnati, as my wife and I did.” That would have been only 50 years after its composition, and this was 30 or so years later.
What is striking me is how much harder it’s been for new music to catch on since then. I don’t think it all has to do with the attempt to write in more original – and often strident – styles.
There’s also a looping of generations, as would happen when a ten-year-old heard something from someone who was 80 relating something he or she had heard at age ten from an 80-year-old’s encounter at age ten with an 80-year-old from age ten. It wouldn’t be hard to have two-century span at hand.
Now, as for naming compositions from the last 50 years that have entered the standard repertoire, it would be a shockingly short list.
Jnana's Red Barn 