I myself just feel lucky that I can enjoy most of this "challenging" music without needing to care about the magnificently strict structure, or how the composer wanted to channel God or something. All I ask is that people not question my sanity on the grounds of my liking of this kind of music.

How many people who perceive classical music as elitist actually have a personal experience of someone on the "inside" acting elitist and shunning them as "outsiders"?

(There's actually no reason nowadays why this published "popular" music shouldn't become a part of the literate canon that's researched academically etc. But that only adds to a very long list of individual composers and entire musical traditions that end up being broadly neglected by standard academic POV's. It's also a general problem wrt. the study of human art and culture.)

Sacred classical music was accessible to poor people in big cities. Secular classical music was less accessible though.

I wonder if the cost and competitiveness of the training has something to do with the problem. The people who can win auditions are in fact elite musicians, and are almost exclusively from affluent families.

I enjoy the challenging music too, in the jazz genre. Given that I'm not trying to make a living at it, I'm grateful for the fact that I can play for a tiny but appreciative and loyal audience. I think there are a lot of niche genres that are sustained largely by amateurs and hobbyists.

I'm sorry to say this but there is no such thing as "needlessly avant garde" in Western classical music tradition imho. WCM is about an artist finding his own sound, finding a unique musical language that puts them in the continuum all the way from Bach to him. If your music is not avant garde, it may be great music, but it's not going to be good WCM music. This is just my humble opinion. I almost exclusively listen to contemporary WCM these days, and the way I engage with WCM is different than the way I engage with other genres of music.

Put it as film analogy, the goal is not to make the best horror movie, the best drama, the best scifi; the goal is to make the most creative/innovative/novel/personal/weird movie that happens to be horror, that happens to be drama, that happens to be scifi. At least that's how I enjoy WCM. Everybody experiences music differently, which is what makes it one of the most beautiful human phenomena.

So in short, the more avant garde the better. Note that Schoenberg's music is already grandpa's grandpa music. We want innovation that goes well well beyond Schoenberg. I would consider 12 tone row music ancient at this point, not even remotely avant garde/experimental.

One could say that for Mozart or Bach (or the Beatles or Miles Davis or Bieber) just as well, as the argument basically amounts to personal taste, doesn't it?

Schoenberg and his followers are dancing to a different tune, and that’s fine for them, but at this point it’s pretty clear that they will at best be remembered for their tangential effects on composers of actually beloved music.

Not to mention Bach had to regain popularity through Mendelsshon.

This is debatable to say the least. Lovers of the avant-garde commonly trot out the argument that there's just no room for genuine, transformative innovation within the mainstream that can be grokked by average folk, that it is played out in some sense. And lovers of mainstream music (and arguably mainstream culture more generally) routinely prove them wrong, by managing to innovate within those boundaries in a way that's genuinely compelling to many. It happens again and again.

avant-garde composers were playing with recording and editing techniques for a long time before the beatles came and used those ideas in a more catchy way, with a hairstyle to boot. The innovation is closer to the business side than to the music itself.

Oh, I must have gotten lost. I thought I was in a forum dedicated to hacking where a post had been submitted to justify the importance of a composer almost universally found difficult to listen to to a mainstream audience. Probably took a wrong turn somewhere.

> Who cares?

Whoever posted the story here clearly did one way or another. Everyone who commented, both of us included, as well. Affecting detachment while taking the time to clearly post how detached one is is not very convincing.

I care about the music, people should be more open to hearing challenging music. That doesn't necessarily mean "the mainstream", that entails a whole cabal of mechanisms at play that go beyond what an individual chooses to listen and how.

Also many now revered composers were shunned by audiences of their time, such as Mahler.

Bach is now regarded as the greatest composer but he wasn't exactly popular during his life outside select circles.

We forget that although there are many surviving transcripts of their work, Mozart and Beethoven also improvised and performed on stage a lot. That whole genre of classical music is lost.

I'm sure many artists fall into the trap of 'the public likes the work I like least'. That doesn't make the work not part of the authors creation. For example, Raffi makes extremely popular (and actually pretty good) music and I'm sure he absolutely hates having to play it over and over again. Still a better artist than Schoenberg.