Alex Ross, who has a nice article on Morton Feldman in this week’s New Yorker, quotes, on on his blog, the late György Ligeti on his view of music history:
“Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.”
I agree completely. But escaping from a room with only two walls has never struck me as particularly difficult.