I recently met someone who minored in music at college and was an enthusiastic fan, but professed to not be interested in contemporary music. Much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, I'm an unashamed proselytizer of what I consider good music, which means that I often find myself stepping up to bat for the music of the past hundred years. (It is deeper than that, though; I also push early music and everything in between, if the need is there.)
My theory is simple: if people gave this music a chance, they'd fall in love with it too. If anyone is willing to listen, I'm willing to play the music for them. At the same time, I'm smart enough not to throw anyone in heads first into, say, some of Boulez's gnarlier scores or Einstein on the Beach. (I hated Einstein for years, but it got its claws into me, and I was only able to fight it off for so long. I now hold the final two sections are up there with any concluding movements of any piece of music ever written.)
It was easy enough to select some good pieces from the triumvirate of Schoenberg/Berg/Webern. Pick a track from Quartet for the End of Time and War Requiem. Throw in a couple of sonatas for prepared piano by Cage. "O King" from Sinfonia fits in nicely.
But then I hit the dilemma. The [post-]minimalist style is really hard to anthologize. The pieces tend to run long, and it's easy for the person to just get bored and skip ahead. As much as I love Gay Guerilla by Julius Eastman, I know it isn't the right place to start. So, then, my thoughts turn to On the Transmigration of Souls. While not particularly representative, it is an effective piece of music. (Making that even more tempting is the fact that this person's field is counter-terrorism.) Is highlighting Adams's pulitzer-prize winning piece manipulative or simply demonstrating that even today, classical music has something to say about the world?
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