This is an excerpt from an article about one of the best painters of 19th century France. However, the implication is also of atonal music being marketed and sold as superior to the music of "dead white men".
"Allow me to try to characterize how I first came upon this recognition.
Just imagine for a moment that you are a lover of great Classical Music, and among your favorite composers were Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Handel. Suppose you're even a music major, and get your master's degree in that field. Then imagine that in spite of that, you had never heard of Chopin or Beethoven, nor ever heard any of their music. Imagine that both of those artists had been methodically maligned and denigrated in the description told to you by a Modernist music establishment. At the most, you'd heard that they were from a small but powerful group of composers who had run the music world, and who didn't appreciate the greatness of Shostakovitch or Bartok, who had ultimately led to the genius of John Cage. You were taught that Chopin and Beethoven were petty academics who wrote romantic, sentimental, inane, vapid, maudlin and silly works, and you were never exposed to, nor was it arranged for you, to listen to any of their music.
Then imagine that a few years after graduating with your Master degree in music, you went to a concert and heard some of the most intensely beautiful works of your life, with incredible orchestration with profound emotionality, equal or better than you'd ever before experienced. You were awestruck with an overwhelming sense of beauty coming from the minds of obviously consummate genius. Quickly you look at the program and see the names Frederic Chopin and Ludwig von Beethoven; and remember, you're imagining that you'd never heard those names before. The next day you run to the library and find out that they were two of the villains who ran the 19th century music world, who you had been told had no talent and whose music was mindless, shallow and vapid.
But you knew what you'd heard, and what had been written made no sense. Next you run to a music store and find their work on some rare CD's and start listening to everything you can find by them, and despite everything written in the music history books, and everything you'd been taught about them, you were certain in the deepest recesses of your heart, you were certain beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, that you had discovered two of the greatest musical geniuses in all of history. Racing through your head are an endless barrage of questions, and outrage. How could such masterpieces ... self-evident ... a priori ... self-validating, consummate, masterpieces have been so maligned, that were written by artists who were not just overlooked, or accidentally forgotten, but who were maliciously targeted to be attacked, degraded, and ridiculed ... and the main reason was because they were accused by the modernists in today's music establishment of having not appreciated the genius of atonal music.
So you started searching for every sonata, nocturne, symphony, and concerto you could find that Beethoven and Chopin had ever written. Perhaps you had only just happened to have heard the only good works they had ever written, a "one time" lucky work where they'd hit it, but they really were all those bad things that had been said about them. And then, as you uncovered work after work after work, you discovered that nearly everything they'd ever written during their mature years were as great, or greater, than the first pieces you had heard at that one concert.
Wouldn't the world seem like it was upside down? The professors and authorities who you had depended on to teach you truth and beauty had literally done nothing more than teach you the party line and a truckload of libelous propaganda, for reasons you still could not fathom."
https://www.artrenewal.org/articles/Philosophy/TheReal19thCentury/thereal19thcentury.phpTHE QUESTION about atonal music is: what do you hear when you listen to that crap? Do you really hear music or do you hear crap? I hear crap. Crap should not be taught nor be required repertoire to be played in music conservatories. If you are a music student and are required to play this crap, tell the piano faculty that you refuse to play crap. Then accuse them of being idiots for asserting that this crap is worthy of any of your valuable time and effort to play. Crap is to be flushed down the toilet, not written down and printed on clean white sheets of paper.
Topic: Atonal music is crap