For instance: there are people for whom the best music must involve innovation. These people are likely to value Varese, Partch, Cage. There are others who value craftsmanship above all else. These people tend to like Hindemith, Sessions, perhaps Ligeti. Other people feel that music should be, above all else, emotionally true; perhaps they gravitate toward Barber, Vaughan Williams, maybe Messiaen. There are people who love music for its sonic lushness and sensuousness, who may relish Takemitsu and Feldman. There are people who value clarity, who value simplicity, who value intellectualism, who value memorability, who value physicality, who value theoretical rigor. Most people value several of these virtues, and we could create Venn diagrams of audiences who love different new musics because of the specific virtues they possess.
[...]
Where subjectivity comes in is that there is no objective criterion by which we can proclaim that craftsmanship is a higher virtue than innovation or sensuousness. We just can't. One type of personality will value the careful, revising craftsman over the visionary innovator who comes up with something radically new, and that's what makes horseraces. There is no way to objectively rank the artistic virtues. They are too closely allied to the structure of personality. Where objectivity comes in is in determing what innovation or craftsmanship is. Say you love innovation but don't believe Varese was innovative? Good luck. I want to read the treatise proving your point, but if it doesn't grab me in three sentences I'm trashing it. We can prove on paper that Varese was an amazing innovator, whether that impresses you or not. I happen not to care much for Varese because, for me, innovation is kind of wasted if the music doesn't grab me emotionally, and his doesn't; but I grant he was innovative. You think Crumb is a better composer than Sessions? You have my blessing. You think Crumb was a better craftsman than Sessions? You're an idiot. If there was a virtue that Sessions nailed to the floor immovably and for all time, it was craftsmanship. Maybe lacking in spontaneity, lacking in originality, in imagination, in goal-directedness, in sensuouness, arguably, but craftsmanship? If craftsmanship means anything in music, Sessions had it in spades. We can argue whether Partch's music shows good craft, and give examples; that's a still partially subjective but more limited and rational dispute than whether he was a "good composer."
[...]
There are people for whom depth is the major musical virtue - and by depth in this context I mean not profundity per se, but the ability of music to reveal more and more layers of meaning on repeated hearings. Depth is certainly a virtue. Many people use this virtue to prize classical music above popular music. I have often had the experience, though, of listening to a pop record and not really appreciating it the first time, but having it grow on me more and more. I've had that experience with pop music as often as I've had it with classical music. Many people who push this virtue use it to prop up the reputation of complex music. But in the early 1980s I turned off a recording of Carter's Double Concerto on what must have been my 75th listening with the score precisely because of that: I wasn't getting any more out of it than I had at the last ten listenings. I had milked it dry. It wasn't yielding anything else.
[...]
The last time I listened closely to Beethoven's Appassionata sonata, I savored it, but I don't really think I found anything I hadn't heard ten years ago. Satie is one of my favorites and I find him extremely profound, but I don't think I'll hear things in Embryons Dessechees the next time I hear it that I haven't noticed before. What's important to me is that I can keep listening to a piece without growing tired of it.
