Most people, if polled, would probably say the past no longer exists. But if that is so, it seems absurd for anyone to try to break with something that simply is not there. For that matter, whatever exists lies firmly in the present, newer than which, logically speaking, there is nothing else.

But to entertain the opposite view, what if the past does still exist? If that is the case, then breaking with the past would amount to cutting oneself off from some ostensibly objectionable aspect of present reality. That might be a very good idea if the presence of the past posed a clear and imminent threat, but it is difficult to see, from a musical perspective, why a Brahms symphony, the house where Mozart was born, or the young composer whose work we heard for the first time yesterday represents any actual danger. What is it, then, that the adherents of modernism are trying so zealously to avoid?

In a word, themselves. They are desperately attempting to escape from the very memories that form the core of their musical identities for fear that those memories will prevent them from discovering and preserving—strange to relate—their musical identities. This curious paradox of evading oneself to find oneself is rather like fleeing from one's own shadow by taking refuge in a cave. Better to dwell in darkness than see the light and be obliged to acknowledge, like Goethe, that "Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. . ."⁶

In their relentless quest for innovation and the illusory cachet of originality it confers in a consumer society driven by planned obsolescence, modernists would split in two, sequestering the "old" self and its memories from the "new" self which presumably has no accumulated burden of knowledge. But since this "new" self must have no connection with the past, no connection with anything that can be recalled, remembered, recollected, or recognized, whence does it arise if not ex nihilo—out of nothing at all?

Indeed, it is nothing at all, no more than a mere fiction. Without memory there can be neither self nor self-consciousness, neither the knowledge that "I am" nor the awareness that "I am a composer making new music." If it were even possible to realize its defining ideals, the gospel of modernism would amount to an ill-conceived prescription for personal and cultural amnesia.

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