According to Shauna Quill, the executive director of the youth symphony, Mr. Tarm declined to elaborate on his intended meaning. Mr. Tarm said Ms. Quill told him that the piece would not be played because it was offensive. The Carnegie performance was canceled, with Ms. Quill writing to students and parents in an email that the work contained material that was “problematic for an orchestra such as ours to be asked to perform.”

This misguided, mishandled decision is a blot on the reputation of the youth symphony and its justly praised First Music competition, which has awarded commissions to 139 young composers since it began in 1984. An institution so adept at fostering new work should be particularly protective of artists and the ways they choose to express themselves. And it is pernicious to cloak censorship in the guise of child protection: If “Marsh u Nebuttya” is playable by any orchestra, it should be playable by an orchestra “such as ours.”

Nor is Mr. Tarm the first composer to incorporate the “Horst Wessel” song into music as commentary. Pavel Haas, who died at Auschwitz, left an unfinished symphony that quotes the anthem. Stockhausen used it in “Hymnen.” The Swedish composer Carl-Olof Anderberg’s 1968 Piano Concerto references it in conjunction with the “Internationale” and other political melodies to illustrate reactions to the Prague Spring. “Critical Mass,” a 2007 opera by the British composer Orlando Gough, juxtaposes “Horst Wessel” with statements by Donald H. Rumsfeld.

But the controversy of this most recent example sadly comes as no surprise in an era filled with calls for “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material people are about to read or see — in a classroom or concert hall — might upset them. And the protests of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” last fall involved the misapprehension that anything and everything expressed in a work of art — even something offensive, such as the anti-Semitic sentiments voiced by the opera’s terrorist characters — receives the endorsement of its creators. The issue in both cases is one of excessive literalism.

Lest there be a similar misunderstanding that “Marsh u Nebuttya” is sympathetic to Nazism, I examined a copy of the score. The “Horst Wessel” passage, which comes a bit more than halfway through the work, begins with quiet bassoons, instructed to play “dark and marchlike.” The musical quotation is punctuated by eerie slides and tumbling scales in the higher winds and by sardonic blasts in the brasses — a Shostakovich-esque touch — as the orchestra rises to scary fury.