I don’t think that the preoccupation classical music has with preserving the norms of centuries long gone is particularly healthy. We shouldn’t expect everyone to experience transcendence exclusively on the terms of contemporaries of Napoleon. Most of these composers were bourgeois men navigating vastly different norms and customs. Douglas Adams said that Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human, but I’d counter than Mozart tells you a lot more about what it’s like to be, say, Galen Weston than an Indigenous janitor at Loblaws. It forces humanity to be explored through a very narrow prism.

Given that I fell in love with music listening to the music of dead people, if Aliens were to destroy all old music and use the neuralizer from Men in Black to wipe it from our collective memory, it would also wipe out a large part of my personality. It might be that I would just stop caring about music, and move on to doing other things. Even if I decided that I wanted to stick with music, I don’t know if I would want to keep playing violin. I might instead gravitate towards learning how to use Digital Audio Workstations. If I were to continue studying violin, it would be with a different objective. I would be less concerned with finding the big, fat tone of a romantic concerto. The composers whose music I would be playing would demand a more physical and varied style. “Extended techniques” would simply be “techniques”, standard tuning might be less of an obvious assumption, and learning to play electric violin might be just as important as knowing how to play “unplugged.” An example of the kind of repertoire I’d be thrilled to spend time with is Suzanne Farrin’s Time is Cage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdZ4YgyZLqQ. Freed from most of the “genre” labels of the past, I could instead focus on arranging tones and colours however I saw fit. Since most extant music would have a companion video, be it a proper music video or a taped live show, I would think it natural and give everything I made a visual component. 

I have two thoughts reading the Nietsche quote. The first is about the importance of keeping received wisdom in perspective; the norms music are contingent, and they vary with time. If you accept them as immutable, you let the past narrow your artistic horizons. Second, I learned from doing a BA in History that if you’re not careful, History can prove anything you want to believe. Divining what is “worth knowing and preserving in the past” is indeed as difficult as he puts it. Third, it’s that I believe playing and listening to the music of the past can be an excellent way of stepping outside of the present moment. This cuts against Nietsche’s quote, because in so doing we shed our ego and submit ourselves to the past. This is why I am so fascinated by Early Music Concerts that accompany music of the Enlightenment, Renaissance or Middle Ages with audiovisual presentations exploring scientific or cultural developments of the time.