[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Though I think that is more true for people who primarily listen to pop music and less true for people who primarily listen to classical music, and maybe to some extent film music. (And of course, there’s always “lots of in between”.)

The “music of a generation” usually refers to the songs that were popular at a certain era. Say “music of the 60s”, and you have a certain sound in mind, stuff like THE BEATLES, Jimmy Hendrix, Woodstock, etc… same with “music of the 80s”. What’s it today? Probably a lot more fragmented and we are all parted and divided by algorithms anyway, so people can be enormously famous to one group and virtually unknown to another (which is a fairly recent phenomenon because of Social Media bubbles).

Now in all these eras there were people who listened to Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schubert, Bach, etc., that stuff doesn’t belong to one era, it’s timeless (like Shakespeare), it doesn’t belong to one generation or one decade, it was performed a hundred years ago and will — likely and hopefully — be performed a hundred years from now.

Film music may be somewhat in between… on the one hand, many get to know and encounter film music through the movies of “their” era, so the music they start with may be the film scores of movies that were popular when they started to develop such an interest. On the other hand, among my favorite film composers are Miklós Rózsa and Bernard Herrmann… they had already stopped composing music (or even living) when I started to collect film scores.