Wow. Really, sandal?
All composers have always written music to be listened to. All.*
"Various antics that some have been trying to pass as 'music'" is a dead giveaway. Of an attitude. It is an attitude, just by the way, that started long before the twentieth century, and you can find practically every criticism that has been leveled against twentieth century music also leveled against nineteenth century music. Eighteenth not so much, because the attitude didn't really get going until the turn of that century.
Really, guys. Get the facts right, first. Then we can have a discussion. The only information in sandal's post is information about a history of twentieth century music that consists entirely of chimera. I remember having heard, and accepted, that "history" over forty years ago. Though it always puzzled me that things should have happened that way, as I had already fallen in love (instantly, by the way) with twentieth century music, and was happily listening to all sorts of delightful things. So even though the "history" seemed logical--composers write difficult or hideous music, then audiences begin avoiding it--it bothered me. The music seemed neither difficult nor hideous to me. And as my explorations took me closer and closer to my own time (which was the 1970's, at the time), I still kept finding only music that I enjoyed listening to.
So we have here first of all a situation in which some people like what they hear and some don't. So what's to choose between those two groups? Nothing. So why is it that the second group is always the one that gets to be "the valid perspective"? That just doesn't make any sense. I have found, I must say, that if you are in the second group, it is almost impossible to convince you of the validity of the first group.
In any case, my bewilderment and unease were very sweetly set to rest once I had read some genuine history. There I found that the anti-modernist attitude had started up in the late 18th, early 19th century. It grew throughout the 19th century, peaking in the 1860s and then again right around 1900. In other words, both peaks (and there was a smaller one around 1840**) preceded any of the horrible avant-garde experimentation of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, whose works were supposedly the ones that set off this mass exodus from the concert halls.
Funny thing, too. The concert halls seem still to be occupied by classical music fans--though financially, there's not enough money from them to keep every hall open--but what you don't find in them is very much music of any avant-garde. The halls are quite remarkably free from those kinds of music. Which raises an interesting question, what are people still whinging about?
Well, if the whinging started out rather disconnected to any actual experience--as it seems to have done--then it should be no surprise that it should continue along those lines. In the nineteenth century, the attitude was directed towards whatever was new at the time, Beethoven, Berlioz, Chopin, Bizet (he's the guy who wrote an opera with no tunes in it, recall), Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler, Debussy. The only "new" thing that happened in the twentieth century regarding the attitude was that it somehow got successfully attached to one person (or to one "style," at least) and stayed attached for, well, it still seems to be attached, though people who manage to actually listen to some Schoenberg with open and sympathetic ears find that it is clearly late-Romantic music, all of it. And quite pleasant to listen to.
It has definitely remained attached, however, to an idea. To a chimera called, variously, "avant-garde" or "atonal" or even simply "modern." And since it precedes experience, whenever any particular piece is actually heard (and how often does the opportunity even arise?), it is easy to reject it instantly. So easy, since you already knew it would be horrible. Kinda like avant-garde pieces are the vegetables of the music world, things that you don't like even before you taste them.
*There a couple of exceptions to this, but I doubt that sandal is referring to either.
**This was smaller, but still serious enough for a Viennese critic to say these words: "the public has got to stay in touch with the music of its time . . . for otherwise people will gradually come to mistrust music claimed to be the best." That was written in 1843. Turned out to be quite prophetic.
