But when the so-called authorities themselves buy in to the idea that nothing is intrinsically worth more than anything else, they become a negative force. They're no longer trying to find great works and expose them to the public; they're just hoping to impose their tastes, promote their political or social agenda, or simply get rich and famous.

I believe the same thing is happening in more popular art forms like jazz or film or some kinds of pop music. Perhaps because these forms don't make quite the same outrageous demands on their listeners and viewers -- and I mean that in the best possible sense -- the process doesn't seem to be as far along. Still, around the world Hollywood movies increasingly dominate the market, driving the various traditions of art cinema to the margins. Jazz, which can require an enormous amount of knowledge to appreciate fully, seems to be fighting for its survival, in constant danger of becoming little more than upscale aural wallpaper. There seem to be fewer and fewer hardcore buffs eager to scour the local clubs for another Coltrane or Miles Davis.

In jazz and rock, the work itself and the performance of it are joined in a way that is quite different from the case in literature or classical music. That relationship may blur some of the distinctions I have been making, but I don't believe it fundamentally alters them. When high school students start broadening their record collections and searching for more adventurous artists they haven't heard before, they do so because they believe that great things are to be found out there. Once that belief disappears, turning on top-40 radio or MTV will be enough.

Real art cannot be an act of manipulation or marketing, but only an act of faith. Faith that great art is something remarkable. Faith that someone, somewhere, sometime might make the effort to understand what an artist has to offer -- and not merely seek what is already known.

Make no mistake, the surrender required by art (even the most accessible art) is hard. Maybe we're no longer willing to make such efforts. There are so many things we could be doing instead. The two hours spent in a concert are two hours we could have been eating a good meal, making love, surfing the Internet or watching TV.

It requires a tremendous leap of faith to surrender control of our perception to someone else, on the off chance that they may offer us something we never knew we wanted but now would not want to be without. If we don't really believe in this possibility anymore -- in the inherent importance and transformative potential of art -- then why would anyone in their right mind take the risk?

Aspiring composers who make the irrational career choice I mentioned at the outset of this article still believe in the power and validity of art (or at least they have suspended their disbelief). If society leaves them no room for that belief, however, they may find that their already marginal position only gets worse. Just as environmentalists came to see that protecting the habitat of endangered species was crucial to saving them -- it wasn't just a question of stopping poachers -- we must realize that the choices we make now about culture and entertainment will determine the future of art.

If we could turn back the history of the human race and run it over again, I'm not sure that anything like the Western artistic tradition would happen twice. It seems like an aberration: a cultural form that serves no obvious function, does not appeal to most of the population, and is so expensive that it can never support itself. Yet this form of expression, which set a tiny handful of individual humans free to pursue their vision without regard to taste, understanding and practicality, has given us an astounding body of work.

One day we might wake up and find that all the young people who dreamed of becoming composers had done the calculation, seen that it was a poorly paid and undervalued profession, and gone into medicine, banking, management consulting or law. It's easy to assume that art has always been with us and always will be, but this is ultimately naïve. The classical repertoire cannot exist in a museum, without a continuing tradition.

As Igor Stravinsky said to Robert Craft in their book of conversations, "The crux of a vital musical society is new music," and this is true of all the arts. Art was the result of specific social conditions. If we eliminate its environment it will die, and no amount of cultural-studies dissertations on Britney Spears or pseudo-intellectual rhetoric about how all expression is equally valid will replace the works that no longer come into being.

In 1802, when his hearing was already beginning to degrade but before he was completely deaf, Beethoven wrote a letter intended for his brothers to read after his death. In this letter, which has come to be called the Heiligenstadt Testament, he bemoans his fate, but asserts his faith in art: "I would have ended my life -- it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me."

That was what pulled me and people like me into composing: the need to bring forth something within us. But what will artists do when everyone is bringing forth and no one is taking in? If artists are willing only to be the artists (or, in contemporary parlance, the content providers) and never the audience, if we as a society cannot give up control in return for a chance at an unexpected insight, if we refuse to take a risk on something new and unfamiliar, then there's no more place for art. What's the sense in being Beethoven if even those who can still hear won't take the trouble to listen?

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