Time & Perspective Quote by Gordon Getty

Getty’s line is doing a neat bit of self-positioning: he’s a man of the present insisting, almost mischievously, that his artistic citizenship lies in the past. Coming from a businessman-composer, it’s not nostalgia as weakness; it’s a strategy. “I belong to the 19th century” announces allegiance to an era when music aspired to long-form emotional architecture, not rapid-response commentary. He’s drawing a bright line between art that wants to be a headline and art that wants to be a novel.

The jab at “topical” composers is pointedly framed through the least romantic medium imaginable: yesterday’s newspapers. That’s not just a critique of political content; it’s a critique of shelf life. News is designed to expire. By likening certain contemporary music to the churn of daily journalism, Getty implies it’s built for the attention economy before the term existed: urgent, legible, and forgettable.

The subtext is also defensive. Getty knows his biography invites skepticism: a wealthy financier writing operas can look like a patron cosplaying as an artist. So he reframes the stakes. He’s not trying to win the modernity contest. He’s opting out of it, claiming a lineage where craft, melody, and inherited forms are virtues, not embarrassments.

Context matters: late-20th- and 21st-century classical music has often justified itself through relevance, critique, and “aboutness.” Getty’s refusal is a bet that sincerity and tradition can still read as radical - not because they’re new, but because they resist the cultural demand to be immediately, explicitly “about now.”