By the turn of the twentieth century, the permanent repertoire of musical classics dominated almost every field of concert music, from piano, song, or chamber music recitals to operas and orchestral concerts. The (a)change from a century before was enormous. In the eighteenth century, performers and listeners demanded new music all the time, and “ancient music” included anything written more than twenty years earlier. But musicians and audiences in the early 1900s (b)expected that most concert music they performed or heard would be at least a generation old, and they judged new music by the standards of the classics already enshrined in the repertoire. In essence, concert halls and opera houses had become museums for displaying the musical artworks of the past two hundred years. The repertoire varied according to the performing medium and from region to region, but the core was largely the (c)same throughout most of Europe and the Americas, including operas and operatic excerpts from Mozart through Verdi, Wagner, and Bizet; orchestral and chamber music from Haydn through the late Romantics; and keyboard music by J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and prominent nineteenth-century composers.
Living composers increasingly found themselves in competition with the music of the past. This is the great theme of modern music in the classical tradition, especially in the first half of the century: in competing with past composers for the attention of performers and listeners who (d)disregarded the classical masterworks, living composers sought to secure a place for themselves by offering something new and distinctive while continuing the tradition. They combined individuality and innovation with emulation of the past, seeking to write music that would be considered original and worthy of performance alongside the masterworks of (e)earlier times.
* enshrine: 소중히 하다
** excerpt: 발췌곡 *** emulation: 경쟁, 모방