When Claudio Monteverdi revived the ancient legend of Orpheus in 1607, he thought of his opera as a favola in musica. It is the traditional purpose of the fable to convey a moral, which, after the manner of Aesop, is usually stated at the end of the story. Monteverdi's librettist, Alessandro Striggio, concludes his final chorus with the following lines:

In Striggio's version, Apollo descends on a cloud to convey Orpheus to the heavens after the disconsolate demigod has lost his beloved Euridice a second time by defying Hades and looking back at her before she had emerged from the Underworld. In classical sources, however, Orpheus—the greatest of mortal musicians—meets with a decidedly grisly fate. Having renounced the love of women in his bereavement, even the magic of his music is no defense against the shrill cries of Bacchic maenads, who in their vindictive fury tear him limb from limb.

A composer of the late Renaissance had no choice but to reinvent the sounds of the classical past for want of any actual musical models, but the myth of Orpheus had survived in literary and iconographic sources. Striggio's happy ending suggests that he and his antiquarian contemporaries would rather transform the myth itself than subject Orpheus once more to so ignominious a fate. It was he, after all, who through the power of his art had saved fellow Argonauts from the deathly songs of the Sirens. It was he whose mellifluous strains had softened the hard heart of Charon, Ferryman of the Dead; silenced the infernal barkings of the monster Cerberus; and so moved Persephone that she implored Hades to restore Euridice to the realm of the living. Christ-like, Orpheus had descended into the very depths of Hades and been resurrected through the power of his art.

For Striggio and his contemporaries, Orpheus was no more to be punished for looking back towards his beloved than they themselves were to be castigated for looking back to Classical antiquity for inspiration that would revitalize the art, architecture, and literature of the day and undergird the creation of a distinctive stile moderno. Thus would it be several centuries later with Igor Stravinsky, whose successful "backward look," vociferously reviled by the maenads of modernism, was largely responsible for salvaging and sustaining musical traditions that might otherwise have been consigned to the hell of cultural amnesia.

European and American composers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries grievously misinterpreted the completion of the great edifice of tonality, which had taken thousands of years to construct, as a sign that it had essentially reached the limits of its usefulness. Art music eventually became an elitist pursuit for academically certified aesthetes who turned their backs on the public even as appreciation for traditional classical music waned with the meteoric rise of the commercial pop industry and flagging support for quality music and arts programs in the public schools. This situation could not continue without devastating consequences.

By the late twentieth century, most composers with advanced degrees found that they could not secure full-time tenure-track posts in higher education, as humanities enrollments and funding in Academe had significantly fallen off. After decades of experimental attempts to deconstruct, reconstruct, or otherwise replace tonality through atonal, dodecaphonic, and other neologistic means, many were nonplussed as the new millennium approached to realize that traditional tonality remained the most enduring feature in the Western musical landscape.

Others saw not calamity but opportunity. Averse to the rampant commercialism of the popular music industry, at least a few understood that their very survival as artists was gravely threatened unless they could generate alternative professional possibilities for themselves outside of higher education. Spurred on by the failure of academic "new music" to find any significant public support, they began in increasing numbers to create work in tonal idioms consistent with their own sensibilities that would be aesthetically accessible yet intellectually challenging to the concert-going public.

It is probably too early to determine the extent of their successes, but in view of its own diminished capacity to provide sustainable career options for its graduates, the Academy itself has begun to reconsider the direction it has taken. Little by little modernist prohibitions against tonality and historicism have been reevaluated, relaxed, or entirely set aside. Resistance of an aggressively political sort, however, lingers on in many quarters, especially among the "old guard" of academic modernists who cannot suffer even a postmodernist to live:

Be that as it may, composers seem to be coming to a clearer understanding about the nature of their relationship and responsibility—their ability to respond—to the public. In the early years of the new millennium, art music has begun to reflect a sensible shift away from experimentation and innovation for their own sakes, and a new definition of creativity has begun to emerge which departs radically from the antihistoricist constraints imposed by modernist ideology. Emphasis is now increasingly being placed on the mastery of traditional forms and styles and the restoration of craftsmanship as primary aesthetic values. Tradition is no longer perceived as the enemy but as a vital resource whose restoration will reestablish modalities of perception and expression as well as vital channels of communication that were largely suppressed in the previous century.

Historicism and eclecticism lie at the very heart of a renascence which represents the fruition of cultural tendencies that have been manifested and will likely continue to be manifested across the span of many centuries. Today's composers enjoy unprecedented aural and visual access to the music of the past, including the traditional repertories of virtually every non-Western human culture whose musical heritage has been preserved. This global patrimony is theirs to revisit and reinterpret with the passionate conviction that creativity is ultimately measured not by specious "strangeness" or novelty but by the degree to which the artist understands and remains true to the explicate form and implicate essence of ideas as timeless as they are selflessly original: