Huh? You go on telling us how skilled you are at appreciating music with lines about inferential distance etc and then you put Brahms at Beethoven's and Bach's level?

I'm totally convinced that visual artists became less accessible with time as their 'inferential distance' increased, and ditto authors, but in both cases its commonplace for the good moderns to demonstrate their ability to do work of the sort that older artists did.

In contemporary symphonic music, John Williams and Phillip Glass dominate the field and far more people still listen to the older composers. If you and your academic friends are much better, why don't any of you prove it by out-competing them? It would obviously be lucrative to do so if you could be as popular as they once were. I'd really like to listen to some modern operas with the musical quality of older operas but better plotting and characterization. I can't be alone in that respect.