Richard Tsuyuki asks about personal, positive responses to "difficult"
music.

Aside from Bach, Brahms and Jazz, there is very little music I like
now that I found difficult initially.  When I heard Penderecki's Second
String Quartet, well before that composer's postmodern turn, I found it
exciting, if impenetrable and, I confess, in part because it appeared
to have a kind of impenetrability approaching chaos (Just a personal
reaction; I am not suggesting that that is what the composer intended.)
When I heard an early performance of Hovhaness' Floating World, which
contains a passage in which the orchestral musicians are instructed to
improvise at random, the result truly is chaotic, but the audience
responded favorably to the conductor's suggestion that he play the work
again as an encore at the end of the concert.  It probably helped that
we were told what to expect, and that it was the heyday of the avant-garde,
which celebrated the new and different for its own sake.

If I like a piece of music initially, I generally like it more after
repeated hearings.  If I find a piece repellent--music by Ades, for
instance--I am not generally inclined to give it a lot of time to try
to make a breakthrough with it; there is too much other music to hear.
As I have an extremely large personal repertoire, I don't think this
is narrow of me--and I am open to the possibility of changing my mind.
My mood or the season makes a difference regarding what kinds of music
I will enjoy on a particular occasion, but not in my overall reaction
to its appeal or acceptability to me as music

Some composers are happy to have their music more "challenging" than
"accessible" to audiences, even a composer as acceptable to audiences
as Jennifer Higdon, whose Concerto for Orchestra had such a sensational
reception.  There is an interesting ten minute conversation among the
British composers Gregson, Hoddinott and McCabe on a CD recording of
their concertos for orchestra, in which they appear to be in agreement
about this.  Personally, I do not find the music of any of these composers
particularly difficult, even on first hearing.

Jim Tobin