I apologize if that was too crude for you,

Crudeness wasn't the problem; the connotation of disapproval was.

Masturbation is hardly valueless; it just serves a rather different function than sex, which seems to me to be a cruder restatement of your earlier point. But the implication of such a view is that the cultural descendant of Beethoven is The Beatles,

That absolutely does not follow. That is not an implication of "such a view" (i.e. my view) at all.

A meta-observation about your comment: it doesn't seem to reflect your having received new information from my previous comments at all. You've simply restated the position that I'm arguing against, without explaining why the things I've said fail to undermine that position.

For example, it should be clear by now that I don't agree that "the cultural descendant of Beethoven is The Beatles", and it should be equally clear why: in addition to the fact that the actual memetic lineage from Beethoven to the Beatles is much less direct than from Beethoven to contemporary art-composers (a point I didn't actually mention explicitly), Beethoven's intention -- his profession, his métier -- was to write the most interesting/advanced/sophisticated music he could. (Beyond the blatant evidence of the music itself, as compared with his (more "popular"!) contemporaries, this is a matter of historical record, as revealed in his letters.) In this crucial respect, he resembles contemporary academic composers much more than the Beatles (who, as popular musicians, have few rivals, of course).

Now, I made it clear in my exchange with MichaelVassar and multifoliaterose that this was what I was talking about. Yet, in the parent comment, you continue to frame the discussion as though that had never occurred:

And so when we discuss "the-thing-that-Beethoven-was-doing" there are two things we could be talking about- making music for a particular set of instruments, or significantly contributing to the history of music.

...as if my idea of "the-thing-that-Beethoven-was-doing" had mainly to do with instrumentation, and as if we all agreed that popularity among laymen was the criterion by which "contribution to the history of music" is to be judged -- in blatant disregard of my previous remarks in this thread.