Now is the future - what is progress

I´m reading a book about the progress in music. (Musik-Konzepte No. 100 Was heißt Fortschritt; Edition Text + Kritik 1998). Ernstalbert Stiebler has written a text which has Verdi's saying "Torniamo allàntico sará un progresso as heading. (Let us go back to the old times: it will be progress). For me it is impossible to be a composer without knowing the past. What makes my music is this knowledge; using classical instrument is composing within a historical context. But there are loads of composers who are just epigones. They like to see them selves as avant garde, but is it possible to be avant garde? In the book Konrad Boehmer is attaching Pierre Boulez for creating a kind of "new speech" just to pretend being avant garde; but what he does could be explained through an existing language starting with the Middle Ages. The post second world war modern classical music has a huge problem that still exist (and I know this from my own work): First the composer has to find out which music will suit his and hers political and esthetical view, then he or she writes music according to this, not asking what is within the composer him or here self, afraid of finding nothing. I've been struggling a lot with this question. A music which be pretend to be avant garde is all ready out dated. It is much more to music than pretending being avant garde.