Steve Schwartz:

>I think we're using "universal" in two different ways.

Steve, I confess that I was twitting you with my initial comment, because
after you introduced the notion of the universal, for rhetorical reasons,
you then broadened the initial claim on your own.  Actually I would not
put heavy money on the existence or demonstrability of any general
aesthetic norms, any more than you would, because I don't think we have
access to enough data to support any.  (I don't rule out the possibility
of some we cannot establish, though.)

>But this is really a modified form of "vox populi."

No, I was not making this kind of appeal, but here I confess to not
writing clearly enough.  So let me try again.  We do have different
models of explanation.

My first formal professional training--before I became a philosopher
and then a librarian--was as an historian, and history, like geology,
claims to be able to explain particular facts or events in terms of other
particular facts or events, without appeal to universal laws, although
probabilities of various kinds, based on what is known about people or
other events, are certainly not excluded.  My aesthetics, similarly,
deal with very particular pieces of music, appealing and unappealing,
inventive or otherwise.  My core belief about aesthetically good music
is that it has the capacity to delight receptive listeners to the degree
that it is inventive in various ways.  Why some folks like one thing and
others something else is a mysterious business, but if a lot of people
like some individual pieces I assume there is some reason connected with
the work and not just that it is some totally unpredictable event based
on the variability of tastes--though, goodness knows, one wonders about
those a lot.

So, the job of explaining musical preferences, and even musical passions,
ought to involve analyzing the music as well as the audience, with any
evidence--or even theories--we can come up with.  There isn't any question
of saying what will appeal to everyone, because almost nothing does.
But some things appeal to a lot of people and there has to be something
sensible one can say about that.  Pointing to observable facts about the
harmony, or rhythm or melodic freshness, etc., even about recurring facts
about harmony related to many works and many people, thus ought to count
for something.

This is all I was really trying to say.

Jim Tobin