For a project I'm working on, I've been spending a lot of time lately reading and thinking about culture in the middle of the 19th century. It was the time when the brand new music by Felix Mendelssohn and Frederick Chopin was wildly popular. And when middle-class audiences in Paris and London and New York were eager to come out and hear the radically new music of the wild German Richard Wagner.

Trying to imagine life in that era of relentless, shocking, exhilarating newness, I got to wondering why today, in the early 21st century, that mainstream musical tastes are still stuck so completely back then, in the 19th century.

Not that there's anything wrong with listening to Wagner or Chopin, or even Mendelsson. But it is strange -- isn't it? -- that an absolute majority of the music performed by all the American symphony orchestras this season will be by just four guys. Four guys who were all composing music during the same hundred-year period that ended more than a hundred years ago: Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky.

Who are our Brahmses and Tchaikovskys, the historically important composers of this time? Why don't we know their music? Why don't we even know their names?

Of the top five living American "classical" composers, I confess I own a CD by only one of them: John Adams, who is the most performed living composer, according to a new survey by the American Symphony Orchestra League. But of the rest of the top five, I recognize the name of only one -- John Corigliano. But had never heard of Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, or Aaron Jay Kernis.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the 1852 version of me would have known about Mendelsson and Chopin and Wagner and a dozen other famous composers.

Back in that supposedly conservative Victorian era, older music, from the 18th and 17th centuries, was almost never performed. Audiences then expected their symphonic music to provide novelty and surprise.

But today, most people who like classical music have simply stopped looking to it for anything new or unfamiliar or unexpected. They may read only the freshest contemporary fiction and rush to cutting-edge independent films, but...music?

From classical music we want only reassurance and nostalgia. Mainly, I think, it's because we tend to think all contemporary orchestral music is going to be harsh and difficult, perverse, atonal, medicinal, random squawks and clicks.

If we assume we'll hate anything more modern than Stravinsky, we're cutting ourselves off from culture, turning ourselves into old fogies prematurely.

I mean, just listen for a minute to a little music by our top living composers: Corigliano's "Voyage for Flute and String Orchestra." "Musica Celestis" by Aaron Jay Kernis. And finally, Christopher Rouse's Concert de Gaudi.

Not harsh, not difficult, not perverse. Simply... new. And worth discovering for the sheer pleasure new music provides. And because if we all close our ears to new work, as we began doing in the middle of the last century, I'm betting that by the end of this new century, our classical music tradition will be dead.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.