Unheard works by Erik Satie to premiere 100 years after his death

Music has an interesting relationship with time and human appreciation. At any particular time, there's a lot of music being produced. It's filtered at the source by things like the Billboard 100 and DJ preference, but a lot of music survives the immediate filter.

Older music is filtered by the brains of the people who experienced it when it was new. A consensus forms on what music was good and should be remembered. There's a nostalgia bump in popularity that lags about 20-30 years behind as middle-aged folk (the people with money and influence) replay the songs from their younger days. That's where "classic rock" and the like come from.

After that, the music is filtered again by people who encounter the previously filtered music for the first time. Music that survives this filter becomes essentially a permanent part of the culture. Here you find pieces like Scott Joplin's The Entertainer and Benny Goodman's version of Sing, Sing, Sing.

So if you're encountering century-plus old music, it's generally the stuff the stuff that our culture has flagged as being the best of its time (by one of several measures, not necessarily the most enjoyable) and still worthy of appreciation. Or it's music nerds doing their thing.