But I don't think it's a good thing to create less than good music in a world that's full of a lot of indifferent music.
Numerous recordings of non-Western music are readily available, and live performances by touring groups can be heard even in our smaller cities.
Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today.
The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.
One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.
I think we're in a very low point of music right now.
Apart from these broader cultural influences which contribute to the shaping of our contemporary musical psyche, we also have to take into account the rather bewildering legacy of the earlier twentieth-century composers in the matter of compositional technique and procedure.
This awareness of music in its largest sense - as a world-wide phenomenon - will inevitably have enormous consequences for the music of the future.
An interesting practice in music since the atonal period of the Viennese composers has been the widespread use of a few tiny pitch cells.
An American or European composer, for example, now has access to the music of various Asian, African, and South American cultures.
In any case, the task of finding fresh approaches to opera and to choral music will be inherited by the future.