When we talk of creative genius, we tend to emphasize innovation, originality, novelty and revolution. But this tendency obscures an important and enduring facet of the creative process: returning to the past to discover the future. "Postmodernism", contrary to the assertions of near-sighted critics, is neither a new phenomenon nor unique to our time. In every age, artists have embraced and incorporated historical concepts and techniques, even of the distant past. The spirit of deliberate archaism common today has existed for centuries. Composers, especially the most "original" and influential, have studied the great music of their predecessors, utilized ancient techniques and traditions, and, in doing so, have revealed their own personalities all the more. (The term postmodernism seems to mean one thing to musicologists, another to literary threorists and nothing at all to many composers, including George Rochberg and Ned Rorem who have publicly ridiculed the concept.)

The sensibility of discovery through the past in music parallels the formation of a mature, individual personality in life. We hope to grow wiser with experience —but what does that mean? It means that we gather memories, and memory forms the basis for our ability to assess new experiences, to ascertain meaning. As this network of memories expands, so does our ability to cross-reference, reflect, understand and predict. Our intuition becomes more reliable. Our past is with us always, not in the form of finished scenes ready for reference, but in evolving images unconsciously transformed by present experience. Just as it is a mistake to reduce the development of a human being's personality to a linear series of events or to assume that we naturally learn (and should be taught) sequentially, so, too, it is an unhelpful simplification to view music history as a linear progression of styles. We can only view our past in the light of our present. Musically, we define what is enduring—or, to a composer, useful—from the past in the context of our present musical diction. That which endures has authenticity, truth. Musical forms and procedures that ring true may fall out of fashion, but they are bound to reappear.

What we usually call our "cultural heritage" might well be thought of as our cultural memory—not an unconscious collective memory, but a tangible, available body of work. This concept personalizes the past, which is exactly what creative artists do. Studying, copying and incorporating the music of the past builds the network of memory and experience.

Bach, whose work greatly expanded the emotional and technical dimensions of the art of music, had a vast knowl-edge of the music of other composers, contemporary and ancient. In a tradition similar to the emulation of masters in the visual arts. Bach transcribed and parodied other composer's music, revealing new aspects of their music in the process. Bach's interest in the musical past included the works of Palestrina and Lotti. He learned from everyone: Vivaldi, Frescobaldi, Buxtehude, Handel, Telemann and many others. His music was up-to-date as well as steeped in tradition. An appreciation of the harmonic and melodic richness, complexity, elegance and power of Bach's counterpoint is further deepened by an awareness of how he integrates, expands and enriches the contrapuntal styles of the previous three hundred years. His music is like an ocean into which all the rivers flow. It combines the ancient with the new, integrating horizontal (melodic) and vertical (harmonic) concepts of musical processes, yielding an unprecedented level of coherence and balance. Bach unified a multiplicity of historical techniques and conditions, creating the enduring impression that it is not merely his personal vision of music, but a defining moment of the art itself. In fact. Bach's music is both deeply personal and, through its unifying eclecticism, comprehensive and universal. After his death, Bach's work fell into neglect. Upon its rediscovery, championed by Felix Mendelssohn, Bach's music became the critical point of refer-ence for generations of composers who looked to the past to discover their present.

Beethoven, in his late works, was also a great unifier of past and present traditions. His most innovative works, such as the final string quartets and piano sonatas, owe their pecu-liar power in great measure to a new historical awareness. Here is real post-modernism, if we rightly understand the music of Haydn and Mozart to represent the then-modern style. Finding the linear, narrative scenarios of the classical style limiting and frustrating, Beethoven returned to forgot-ten or neglected textures and procedures to give expression to passions too far-ranging for current fashion. Turning to fugues, the Bach-inspired concept of chorale prelude (in the Heiliger Dankgesang of Opus 132) and brief Baroque-like dance movements (Opus 130), Beethoven saw the history of music as his personal inheritance.

Beethoven transformed the chorale-prelude concept in the Heiliger Dankgesang ("Holy Song of Thanksgiving") by presenting it in three self-contained statements, the second and third gaining in emotional intensity as they transform the Baroque texture through fragmentation and feverish dissoci-ation. The three statements are separated by two pillars of utterly ecstatic music (marked Neue Kraft or "New Strength"). This music also becomes more intense in its sec-ond incarnation, but by the most elaborate Baroque-inspired ornamentation ever penned. The movement is, therefore, constructed as two independent pieces—the Heiliger Dankgesang chorale prelude and the Neue Kraft—which are cross-cut, as in cinema technique. The two "scenes" evolve independently but create a powerful single scenario that strengthens both. Thus Beethoven manages to retain the identity and integrity of the old tradition while simultane-ously transfiguring and transcending it.

Mendelssohn and Schumann added keyboard accompa-niments to solo violin works of Bach, in the belief that Bach's inspiring "studies" for violin could be brought to the concertstage by "the greater richness of means of recent times", as Schumann put it. Schumann's fascination with Bach's ability to imply several voices of counterpoint with a single melody can be heard in the elusive, dreamlike polyphony of Schumann's own piano writing.

Schumann's collection of historical musical manuscripts made a great impression on the young Johannes Brahms. Brahms, too, became an important collector of old manu-scripts. In addition to being a composer, Brahms was an editor and avid musicologist whose views on Bach and Mozart were well known. In his lifetime, the first complete editions of the works of Bach, Handel, Lassus, Schiitz, Couperin and Palestrina appeared in print. Brahms participated in this rev-olution of musical scholarship, editing works of Couperin and realizing continue parts (writing out keyboard parts from shorthand) for some works in the complete Handel edition. Inspired by his study of Bach's chorale settings, Brahms then dug further into the past, examining Lutheran chorales of the Renaissance. In the great tradition of learning by copying out masterworks (a valuable technique of deep learning, uniting mental and physical networking, lost to photocopying), Brahms copied Palestrina's Missa Pape Marcelli. He continued in the tradition of Mendelssohn, conducting works long for-gotten before a bewildered Viennese audience. His knowl-edge of the past profoundly informed his own composing. Old forms and procedures—passacaglia, fugue, chorales and elaborate contrapuntal textures unpopular in his own day— appear throughout his work. His E Minor Cello Sonata, Op. 38, pays tribute to Bach, most obviously in the theme of the

finale, which is almost a quote of Contrapunctus 13 from Bach's Art of the Fugue. Brahms was also captivated by Bach's Chaconne for unaccompanied violin, which he arranged for piano, left hand only, for Clara Schumann. Employing old forms in his work, Brahms explored a profoundly personal and rich harmonic language. But even in his progressive har-mony (as Schoenberg described it), there is an underlying historical sensitivity, especially an interest in archaic modes. The musically trained listener will pick this up in the frequent use ofplagal cadences (conjuring up an ancient ecclesiastic tradition), extensive pedals and picardy thirds, among other devices; the untrained listener, if familiar with early music at all, will surely detect the resonance of history.

Debussy expanded music's vocabulary and syntax. He gave a new spin to familiar chords, divorcing them from their traditional functions, creating a floating world without polarity or gravity. Inspired by Javanese, Japanese and Chinese music, Debussy profoundly changed the texture of European music. Yet, this truly revolutionary composer—who said, "There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law."—also turned to the past to recover what he considered lost musical values. Debussy asked, "Where are the old harp-sichordists who had so much true music? They had the secret of gracefulness and emotion without epilepsy, which we have negated like ungrateful children." He paid the Baroque mas-ters obvious tribute (in, for example, Suite Bergamasque), but there are also subtle manifestations of Debussy's admiration of Baroque qualities throughout his music. The elegance and clarity learned from Couperin and Rameau permanently affected Debussy's aesthetic, even in such exotic excursions as Pagodes or Et la lune descend sur Ie temple qui fut ("And the moon descends over the temple that was").

Arnold Schoenberg, too, found time future contained in time past. His invention of twelve-tone serialism is best understood as an extension of German musical traditions in an attempt to assure a new classicism. He moved forward and backward simultaneously, the traditions securing his footing as he reached into the unknown. Schoenberg wrote works "in the olden style" (Suites Op. 24, 25 and 29) where well-worn forms set boundaries for his innovations. Perhaps, more important than his frequent use of conventional forms is the fact that Schoenberg never broke free of nineteenth-century tonality's phrasing. Schoenberg "liberated dissonance" and conceived a new approach to the organization of intervals, but remained fiercely faithful to a classical concept of form as thematic development. Later in life, Schoenberg occasionally returned to tonality (composing such works as the 1934 Suite for string orchestra and Kol Nidre). He wrote in 1948, at the age of seventy-four: "...a longing to return to the older style was always vigorous in me."

Although Igor Stravinsky's historical awareness is usually dubbed "Neoclassicism", it was more far-reaching than that unfortunate catch phrase implies. In his Symphony of Psalms, Stravinsky creates a unique synthetic musical universe by richly integrating sonorities, polyphonic textures and modes of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and the twentieth century. "Dumbarton Oaks" pays obvious homage to Bach, specifically the third Brandenburg Concerto, beginning with the parodistic opening phrase of the work. The Rake's Progress, an opera inspired by the work of the eighteenth-century English artist William Hogarth, is firmly rooted in Mozartian method. A harpsichord is employed for recitatives, and the opera is structured as a set of arias, reprises of arias and ensembles. The operas melodic and harmonic language is informed at every level by classical aesthetics. Perhaps, the most intriguing and self-conscious example of an historically aware approach to composition is to be found in Stravinsky's Agon. Here, Stravinsky plays a fantastic game, a contest of historical perspectives and methods: medieval counterpoint, Renaissance dance forms, Baroque fanfare, Classical tonality, Romantic chromaticism and contemporary serialism. It is another of Stravinsky's unique synthetic fabrics – a tapestry woven of threads from the entire history of European musical syntax. Neoclassicism doesn't begin to describe it. Stravinsky's historical awareness resulted in a new kind of musical ritualism: detached, precise, vivid, primal.

The distinctive modernity of Olivier Messiaen is richly informed by ancient Greek, medieval European and Hindu rhythmic procedures. His concept of rhythm, including the symbolic aspects of rhythm, resulted in pan from a study of the 120 provincial rhythms listed in the thirteenth-century Salgita-Ratnakara by Carnagadeva. Messiaen also studied Chopin's free-falling ornamental cascades, Stravinsky's inde-pendent rhythmic blocks and Debussy's floating rhythmic clouds. Taking his cue from Stravinsky, who managed to inte-grate varied approaches to tonality, serialism and modality, Messiaen developed an elaborate personal harmonic language. Drawing on techniques from many cultures and traditions, both ancient and modern, Messiaen constructed a musical method more thorough in nature, but less systematic, than Schoenberg's. His approach defined a rich palette of not only melodic and harmonic principles, but also of rhyth-mic and timbral processes. The mystical perspective of an impassioned, subjective Catholic worldview is palpable in Messiaen's music. It is spiritual in its depiction of awe, terror, mystery, merciful tenderness and ecstasy. It is theological in its precision of method and rigorous sense of order.

Arvo Part and John Tavener, like Messiaen, express their religious orthodoxy through music. Unlike Messiaen, both these composers write music that, while clearly of our time, seems to spring directly from European medieval and Renaissance music, as if the years between then and now never existed. By rooting a contemporary musical language in that of an ancient period when the church's power was near-ly absolute, a strange ritualistic power emerges. The music seems at once archaic and daring, impersonal yet passionate.

Even a radical modernist such as Elliott Carter owes much of his thinking to historical concepts and techniques. The composer himself has explained that his rhythmic and contrapuntal innovations, hallmarks of his ultramodern lan-guage, can be traced to the rigorously independent style of polyphony of medieval composers such as Ockeghem and Machaut, as well as to Indian and Balinese rhythms ("especially the accelerating Gangsar and Rangkep", he noted), Watusi music, Italian music of the quattrocento, and more recent music by Scriabin and Ives.

Toru Takemitsu brought together ancient Japanese instruments and musical concepts with twentieth-century European aesthetics. But his is an art of confrontation rather than integration. His musical works, in which these traditions co-exist, are neither pastiches nor collages, but juxtapositions or simultaneities. Takemitsu, like the Chinese composer Chou Wen-chung who studied with Varese, not only viewed the past through the present, but confronted two cultures as well. For them, the ancient music of their countries was a liv-ing tradition, and contemporary Western music was a fron-tier. Chou and Takemitsu have created a pioneering, seminal body of work that has had a profound influence on the next generation of Asian composers, such as Tan Dun, Qigang Chen and Bun-Ching Lam.

All this is not to say that using forms and procedures of the past necessarily gives meaning to ideas. Traditional forms cannot provide trivial musical ideas with authenticity, just as a good plan for a house will come to nothing if it is con-structed of poor materials. George Bernard Shaw thought that Brahms "dressed himself up" as Beethoven and Bach in this way. Shaw warned the public not to fall for Brahms's playacting: not to imagine that "it's the cowl that makes the monk." Angered by Brahms's return to classicism, Shaw missed the power and passion of the ideas and the progressive nature of the harmonies that were supported by traditional pillars. Shaw was wrong concerning Brahms, but he did col-orfully articulate a musical issue that was to dominate twen-tieth-century composition. There have been many composers who turned to classical forms in desperation, like squattersmoving into abandoned houses. Shaw's description of Brahms would be better suited to composers such as Hans Pfitzner, especially in his bloated chamber music, or David Diamond, whose frequent use of sonata-allegro for first movements and grandiose fugal textures in final movements sounds like pompous posturing. Composers who, like politi-cians, seem to be driven by a concern with their own place in history and who, like many critics, imagine art as a parade of masterpieces created by titans, ironically undermine the real importance of the past: a source of continual renewal.

All the music that a composer has heard becomes memory and forms language, without which musical thinking is impossible. The selection process known as creativity is based on a sense of authenticity, or inner truth. We discover truth in a piece of music and so, as composers, we identify with the gestures of that music, which become integral to our own musical imagination.

Although I had written many canons as exercises while at Juilliard, I had not felt that there was a compelling context for canonic technique in my music for many years. Double canons seemed like fascinating but archaic and artificial musical puzzles. In composing, even the thought of using such a device never occurred to me. Not until I composed my fourth quartet, that is. Unlike most of my music, the fourth quartet was consciously composed about a real life event. Normally, I will think in music when composing; extra-musi-cal concepts do not enter the process (even if I discover, after the work is complete, what may have been the catalyst). But in the case of the fourth quartet, I set out from the start to compose a work about the shock, denial, sorrow, hope and resignation connected with a friend's disease. In the final movement, I wanted to compose music of acceptance — not of the disease, but of the terrifying fact that we are not rulers of our destiny. Somehow, the music should say, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends." It should be music that relinquishes control and accepts the idea that control is impossible. A canon would serve the purpose: by its very nature, it conveys the message I sought. Once it is clear that a canon is in progress, the listener accepts the "fate" of the initial music, paralleling the experience of acceptance in the face of illness. To intensify the drama of the music, I composed not a single-voiced theme, but music in two voices. This gave rise to a double canon, since both voices were caught in the web. To achieve the serenity and dignity the subject required, I used medieval modes. The four-part harmonies that result once the double canon is in full swing, however, are far removed from medieval music. Composing this movement was a transforming experience for me. What had previously been historical information (double canon technique) was now per-sonal, essential to my thinking about life and musical meaning.

We now live in a multi-dimensional, pluralistic musical world. Unlike previous generations, we have available all of the music the world has produced and continues to produce. There is no dominant school of thought, even concerning basic questions of musical grammar. A composer today may choose to work in any kind of tonal, modal, atonal or rhythmic language, or combine them in any way. This daunting and inviting array of choices is a great challenge to the imagination. It is almost as if we had memories of more than one childhood in several countries at various times in history. The only way to proceed is to start from within: the cadence of our breath, the pulse of our blood, the natural music of the body, the counterpoint of mind.