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Eh, first of all composers specially the ones you mentioned were fully aware of what was going on and some (Schoenberg, Wagner) attempted to predict the course of music history with various degrees of success. Hell, Wagner wrote books on things like what a piece of art "should be" and so on. Likewise, grouping Cage, Carter or Reich in the same bag of "postmodernism" makes zero sense; I might as well just include Ravel, Poulenc, Ives, Stravinsky, Penderecki or Ligeti since there's no point to that distinction anymore if you're just naming random names you happen to know that are from the 20th century. Also, of course, Schoenberg and Debussy were directly opposed, even if we label the overall period to be "modern" it's a stupid oversimplification and leads into the mistake of thinking they had anything to do with eachother besides living in the same time period (see also CPE Bach and his influence on the Vienna Classic and the countless composers who lived in the same period as Mozart and Haydn yet are not part of that group.) Second, music is obviously influenced by the other arts, historical events and so on. Likewise, the labels often come from the other arts rather than from music itself (futurism, romanticism, impressionism, are all terms applied to literature and visual arts first, then to music.) It may give the false impression that music is out of sync with things but this is not the case. For example, Schubert representing the "black romantic" in literature with his Winterreise in spite of his labeling as "early romantic," while at the same time in literature it is considered the late romantic. Labels may desync as the meanings of things change from art to art, but that doesn't mean that music exists "ahead" or lags behind of its time. Third, we can surely agree on where we were, as a matter of fact there's an entire field of study dedicated to precisely just that. This is like saying we can "hardly agree" that Napoleon existed, come on now. Don't talk as if all this is nebulous since it quite isn't and we know more about history now than we have ever known in hundreds of years! Not only do we know stuff now, but because of that we can see trends in style and it's much easier to predict what is going to happen than it was for others centuries ago or even decades ago. And finally, I don't see why writing and looking at an overall picture of the state of music are mutually exclusive things. It would be much more intelligent for a composer to be aware and gather as much knowledge as possible from both history and current events than relegate that responsibility to others as if he had nothing to do with it. Doing so would of course automatically lead to an impression of what the overall picture is all the while they can still write whatever they want but of course they would be more informed and better equipped to do whatever they wanted to do.

Maybe it's a lesson in not being sucked in to analytical discussions when you don't have time to analyze the piece.