Jos Janssen:

>So here is the question: what exactly makes a piece of music "wear out"?
>Simplicity of form?  Bleakness of melodic shapes?  Predictability?  Any
>thoughts?

None of these.  I think it is the listener, not the music, that
wears out.  Overindulgence in anything leads to tedium or fatigue, for
psychological or neurological reasons I do not fully understand.  If you
do not overdo a piece of music, you can come back to it repeatedly and
find it fresh and exciting even after many years--assuming you like it
in the first place, of course.  But if you wear yourself out listening
to it too often you may have difficulty paying attention to it on later
hearings--even many years later--and when your mind wanders from it, the
piece is lost to you.  At least this has been my experience--in both
kinds of cases.

Jim Tobin