John Adams stated in a recent interview:
"I don't like Opera, I almost never go to the theater, I don't listen to my contemporaries, and the opera composers of the past that I appreciate are very few: Wagner, Berg, Debussy's Pelléas..(....) I am happy to have been born in the United States: here we do not feel the oppressive weight of European classical music and one is freer to express oneself with one's own language. For us, the great "classics" are Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis"
.. it makes you think a little