Comment by madaxe_again

Neither, I’d argue. The greats that we look back at were the outliers, the madmen at the fringe. For every Beethoven or Mozart there were a thousand thousand nobodies cranking out the same stuff that their grandfathers wrote. Rachmaninov was seen as nouveau trash in his time, Holst derided, Gershwin hackneyed. Eno perhaps falls into the same category.

Hell, in a century you’ll see string quartets banging out Aphex Twin at elegant soirées. The real connoisseurs, of course, nod knowingly and mutter that drukqs is “early period”.

Similarly, plainsong was seen as “classical” music for many centuries, and was also a largely rigid form, but there exist some absolute bangers in the canon, mostly unattributed because monks.

It’s hard to see the sweep of history from within it.