...the speaker, an "English teacher", could end his question with a question mark. That's the funniest part of the cartoon! I wonder if it was deliberate.

I gather from your past comments that you dislike Postmodernist thought and art, and that you prefer the early Romantics, who integrated emotion into the Enlightenment before the Late Romantics drove over the cliff of sentimentality. Your focus is musical, whereas mine is literary, so I realize that my description is not quite precise, but I think it will do for a one-sentence summary.

We live in the period when Postmodernism is still being developed, so there's a lot of trash out there, failed experiments and pure dross, being produced side by side with work that has staying power. Problem: We won't know what the latter is until it's been around for a hundred years or so, by which time we'll all be too dead to enjoy it. I agree, it's mostly derivative, a commentary on what has come before, but then, civilization itself is like that: either reaction against or commentary and decorative additions upon that which came before.

The Romantics produced their share of bad philosophy and bad art, which has mostly been forgotten. The best is what remains, because it has spoken to enough people to have been preserved in libraries and legends, and to continue to be read and performed. You can choose to draw your inspiration from that distilled body of Romantic work, knowing that you have excellence as your guiding light.

Sometimes I think about the American Constitution that way: a piece of excellence drawn from the Enlightenment. The miracle is, as a political document, it still works, though most of the Enlightenment has fallen by the wayside. But that defines genius, doesn't it?