I have very little respect for those composers, but I am not going to start naming them and opening myself for a slander suit, thank you very much. I think they should listen to old music in the same way they would listen to new music and new music in the same way they listen to old music. I am not convinced that anybody hearing a late Beethoven string quartet for the first time would understand it anymore than they would understand my quartet, the one that you heard last month, for the first time. Not that music should be cerebral, but if there is not an intellectual component in music then it is not art, in the same way that if there is no intellectual component in painting, poetry or theatre, it is not art. You must listen and you must absorb all you can.
Music can be very difficult and profound, with difficult ideas.
That is why you can keep going back to those pieces because every time you hear them you are getting more of the content and discovering things. We live in a society with lots of nonsense, and the particular nonsense that we live with in our current society, whether it's in music or anything else, is this compartmentalization and some of it manifests itself in gender studies, which have very little to do with the particular subject that is being studied, whether it be music, painting, sculpture, poetry, drama. The whole notion of trying to enfranchise groups that have perceived themselves, mostly correctly, as having been disenfranchised is not the solution to the problem. In music for example we have the same kind of movements. The problem with women having been historically disenfranchised has been solved.