I wonder, are we necessarily cleverer or more sophisticated than people from previous centuries. I think we may unconsciously hold a deep seated assumption that we are. But what if we are actually duller and less acute: would we even know? We are undoubtedly adept with the use of modern technology but this may make us less acute, rather than the contrary. It is far too easy to imagine oneself superior to someone now 'safely' dead and unable to defend his/her views and position. Is it possible that we may be entirely unaware of our own limitations and arrogance.
In my head this next point is intuitively linked to the last one but I am not quite sure exactly why: not yet.
I was educated as a music student to believe that modern classical music is following a continuing path of development and that any problem (such as the perceived lack of public interest) is ONLY that we just don't 'get it', that we don't understand it yet: but that future generations will. I have come to believe that this idea, as much as it may truly exist, may be false.!
I believe that the glory days of Classical music may have passed; I feel that there is no logical reason to believe that the processes that caused and allowed the flowering of genius into what we call 'classical music' from the 12th to the 19th +/- centuries are necessarily perpetual. I believe that the situation is more like the discovery of a gold mine and that sadly the treasure that we seek is all but gone, save for the occasional discovery of a small but wonderful untapped 'vein'. To change the metaphor, once they reached California, they (the wagons) could go no further west. Although possibility and invention ARE infinite, human experience (psychological/experience) is not. It is still, in essence, a journey through birth, childhood, love, work, parenthood, age and death: and these cliché concepts effectively limit our common experience. I believe that the 'glory days' were possible because of a conjunction of forces, social, scientific/technical, economic, spiritual and psychological. I believe that 'cutting edge' modern 'classical' music is often forced to explore ever-darker aspects of human emotion/psychology as it aspires towards the pretensions of originality and that consequently fewer and fewer 'normal' people are able truthfully to tolerate it. I believe that we have always had genius amongst us but that these days they find themselves writing musical shows and film music i.e. effectively retrospective genres: I would quote as examples Stephen Sondheim and the score for Sweeney Todd and film composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer. Personally I can not really listen to film music AS classical music because I find its lack of 'directed contiguous musical argument' annoying: but that is another issue.
One reserves the right to change one's mind about all or any of this.