After 75 years or so in which the most respected academic composers have been writing "music" that nobody likes and denouncing their critics as bourgeois pedants, we are still left with the question of what music is and whether there is some legitimate sense in which Beethoven is "better" than Pierre Boulez.
The latest attacks on modern music have come, not from conservative critics, but from neurologists. It seems that it is pretty much impossible to define music, but we all know it when we hear it. The questions is, why do we know it when we hear it? Is it just because we are culturally conditioned to recognize it? Apparently not, because even six-month-old babies respond more to music with a traditional melody than to atonal, arhythmic noise. Neuro-musicologists are now asserting that we respond to music because it matches up to certain strongly innate patterns in our brains. Obviously there is a great deal of flexibility in this mechanism, but the latest thinking is that it does exclude a vast universe of sounds that are not melodic or rhythmic enough to resonate with our brains. Music that doesn't match up with what our brains expect may be exciting to theoretically-minded musical rebels who are mainly looking to like something that pedants like me don't get, but it will never have wide appeal.
Philip Ball has an interesting essay on the topic here. I also like his approach to reviewing a book he dislikes, which is to completely ignore the book and just say what he thinks about the topic.
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Saying that something is music if a baby brain responds to it in a particular way would be like saying all literature must be picture books with easy-to-understand words.
There are fairly basic reasons (fundamentally mathematical) why our standard scales are most pleasing on a primitive level. Atonal music attempts to find a way of expressing musical ideas without appealing to those most primitive circuits, but that doesn't mean it is not music.
It's certainly wrong to suggest that people who don't like atonal music are deficient. But it is equally wrong to try to define atonal music as "not music" just because you don't find it appealing.
"The Rites of Spring" caused a riot at its premiere, it so violated the norms of music of its day. Our ears can become attuned to different sounds.
I have a friend who plays punk music for her kids, and they love it, even though I'd have thought that was unlikely. Punk music, although loud and badly sung, is essentially fairly simple.
Mind you, lots of new compositions are crap composed by eggheads in academia. I think the main problem is the academia part.
I suppose it is true that the preferences of babies do not necessarily predict the preferences of adults. But the point remains that the existence of an innate mechanism for recognizing music implies that some things are music and some are not. Obviously this mechanism is trainable, so people can learn to hate some kinds of music just as they can learn to hate it. The question is whether the flexibility is infinite. Both our general experience of how most people respond to music and the latest neurological research suggest that it is not, and that some kinds of noise will never be music to very many people.
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