For young classical musician and composer Sean Neukom, the classical composers of the past are most important for their legacy as visionaries. The greatest classical composers pushed human consciousness forward, and he believes that musicians today should want to emulate them.
What the great composers of the past were able to achieve is astounding. “Without the technologies we now have, without the audio recordings, without marketing (as a thing unto itself), they pushed human consciousness,” he said in the phone interview on Aug. 20, 2015.
People were forced to find a language in order to talk about the work of these composers. Music theory, “always a retrospective study,” he says, developed afterward in response to what the musicians had already achieved.
