From the footnotes of the chapter Sounding Icons in his book on Pärt:
“Pärt’s own example has helped liberate many composers from a sense of duty towards gestural dissonance, and there has been a proliferation of scores (especially in the choral world) featuring slow tempos and diatonic absolutism to show this! Even though it must be admitted, and without surprise, that many of these lack Pärt’s precision and imaginative intensity, one can at the very least welcome the lack of pretension, and indeed the practicality of such music, often representing the only kind of new music that amateur choirs can dream of attempting. This is a far from unimportant contribution to contemporary music’s biggest task: to rebuild its constituency through the re-establishment of a common musical language, or rather a plurality of mutually intelligible languages!” (2)
Sick burn on modernism and post-modernism there. It’s a nice idea and pretty words, but who gets to judge (and how) what the common musical language is, or what the plurality of mutually intelligible languages are? The Invisible Hand? A faceless panel of voting music critics or scholars? A burning eye on top of a tower?