Is it your contention that modern musicians write Clasical minuets and Baroque fugues which are in some cases better than the best of the older works that are still listened to, but that no-one cares because much of the value of those works is in their role in a canon?

I could easily believe that in those cases, but I simply don't believe it in the case of Opera. The Opera cannon is just not very large. Some people have heard the whole thing and only like a few dozen operas. It doesn't seem likely that there isn't demand among such people for higher quality new material in old styles, so if no new material is becoming popular then the un-met demand makes me think that contemporary music students are failing to produce work that this audience actually values due to now knowing how to replicate the merits of older compositions.

It should really be pretty easy to do a controlled experiment with a naive population to see how common it is for modern artists to be able to impress an audience as much as their 18th and 19th century precursors did.

I'm seriously interested in someone performing some experiments on this subject. It seems to me that it would provide an extremely practically important measurement of the quality of university education in fields inaccessible to outsiders, but I don't expect to be able to attract funding for such research because it sounds impractical at the face of it.

I guess that my major reason for holding the contrary position was largely because modern musicians and composers, more than painters and authors, are the results of university education and I fairly strongly suspect university education of destorying artistic ability and distracting artists with intellectual games that simply lack the merits of the fields that the academic subjects are derived from. I suspect this in math as much as in music, and I think Von Neumann agreed with me, as this quote suggests.

"As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second or third generation only indirectly inspired by ideas coming from ‘reality’, it is beset with very grave dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing, more and more purely l’art pour l’art. This need not be bad, if the field is surrounded by correlated subjects, which still have closer empirical connections, or if the discipline is under the influence of men with an exceptionally well-developed taste. But there is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the line of least resistance, that the stream, so far from its source, will separate into a multitude of insignificant branches, and that the discipline will become a disorganized mass of details and complexities. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much ‘abstract’ inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration."