Aging & Wisdom Quote by Peter Warlock

Warlock’s line is a neat little grenade lobbed at two targets at once: nostalgia merchants and futurist gatekeepers. By insisting music is "neither old nor modern", he rejects the lazy shortcut of timeline-as-taste, the habit of treating a date stamp like a review. The real provocation is the absolutism: "either good or bad", with "no significance whatever" delivering the kind of blunt finality that reads less like polite aesthetics and more like a refusal to play the prestige game.

The subtext is defensive and insurgent. Warlock wrote in a Britain obsessed with musical pedigree, where "old" could mean canonized and therefore safe, while "modern" often meant suspect, noisy, or morally unserious. His claim refuses both forms of snobbery: the museum-glass reverence for the past and the self-congratulating belief that novelty equals value. It’s also a composer’s plea to be heard as sound, not as a position in a cultural argument.

That binary - good/bad - is intentionally crude, a rhetorical shove to wake the listener up. Warlock isn’t pretending taste is simple; he’s attacking the way institutions simplify it for us. Programmers, critics, and patrons love eras because eras are marketable: Baroque nights, contemporary festivals, "rediscovered" composers. Warlock cuts through that branding. If a piece hits, it hits; if it doesn’t, the calendar won’t rescue it.