This post from Kyle Gann. He puts into dif­fer­ent words, and thus a use­ful per­spec­tive, some of the aspects of con­tem­po­rary music that I have issues with. The tech­ni­cal detail, espe­cially this:

I keep hear­ing new operas that, to my ears, all keep mak­ing the same mis­take. Namely: it sounds like the com­poser writes the instru­men­tal accom­pa­ni­ment first, and then lays the vocal line over it. The vocal lines, draped on as an after­thought in this way, lack mem­o­ra­bil­ity. They tend to be shape­less, often even frag­men­tary. They seem to fol­low the har­mony, rather than the har­mony illu­mi­nat­ing the vocal line. I feel that the pur­pose of an opera, or any piece of music with a text that needs to be under­stood, is to amplify the words and vastly increase their power, make them vivid.

… to me cap­tures the prob­lems and the solu­tions exactly. I auto­mat­i­cally tilt to the more meta­phys­i­cal, which is the easy flight to safety and how it is the oppo­site of what com­posers should be doing, in my opin­ion. Artists starve, indeed, but they have the free­dom and oppor­tu­nity to be het­ero­dox, and artists who both starve and con­form seem to me to be lost. In the case of John Coolidge Adams him­self, he became a non­con­formist when he revived Roman­tic aes­thet­ics and that has made him the artis­tic, social and com­mer­cial suc­cess he is today. That’s the les­son to be learned from his work, not how the notes are laid out on the page.