What if one only despises some new music, Reiner? 

I thought that too, but clearly the stuff you like you HAVE heard and you won't discuss on this thread. The music you don't like and maybe not eard (much) as Reiner suggests, CAN be discussed on this thread, so I might discuss Cage but I won't discuss Ligeti (in this thread), Stravinsky or William's Harry Potter music (that's new music I suppose, but not 'new' music - I think we've had THAT discussion before, what is 'new' music and why is everything since 1945 known as 'new' music, and why is some Stravinsky referred to as 'modern' when it's about 100 years old, well this might become a hefty thread)

Fair point Reiner but why do people use personal insults when a reasonable point of view is made contradicting what they think of modern music? Do they think , because they like it , that anyone else who doesn't is inferior? that is the impression that comes over very quickly indeed. I was insulted tonight, along with Baz... for expressing amazement at the posting on the 'other' thread... as if I had no knowledge of anything to do with music therefore I must be grumpy... jealous and all the rest of it.

A

I've talked before about 'lines in the sand' - the point beyond which a listener can no longer comprehend certain combinations of sound as music. We all know that these exist for the vast majority of listeners, yet can be in very different places for different people. We're never going to get anywhere arguing over them: there's no agreed standard: they're the product of taste, experience and the way an individual brain is wired, and nobody has a right to claim that his/her lines are the only ones that matter, or berate someone else simply because theirs are located elsewhere.

We're likely to go round in circles here precisely because it's across this period of music that most people's lines are drawn; mine are, certainly, though they shift, and I find that some composers I expect not to appreciate intrigue me, whilst others (whom those I usually sympathise with are excited by) leave me cold: but that's true for composers of other periods, too. I don't think the word despise exists in my vocabulary for any music, although maybe for those who hoodwink others into believing dross is gold. But then again, who actually decides which is the dross, and which the gold? Repeating something else I've said recently, music's value is eventually measured by its longevity, and if it's new, we really have no way of knowing whether it will achieve classic status or not, meaning that yea- and nay-sayers have about an equal chance of being right or wrong.

It's not just the sound of music either, but the forms it takes. Most people can accept a modernised version of a classical form, but, just as in modern technology, development is rampant, and not everybody can come to terms with something which appears to them to have no discernable structure or logic. Stuart's question is a valuable one, in that it does at least allow for a different, more conciliatory outlook with the posibility of an open question: 'What new music do you like?', which is rather more likely to lead to positive discussion than assuming that somebody hates it all, and giving them no option but to say exactly that.

I will have my cake and eat it.

Well at least you did not join the thread concerned throwing insults at the initiator. Oh, hang on a mo, that's exactly what you did do, isn't it?

Mote and beam, A, mote and beam.

What a small world, Richard. There you go mentioning Sarah, and who should I bump into at the Vermilion concert on Saturday night but Martin. Now, are you likely to be attending any of the Warehouse Cutting Edge concerts in the near future?