And ALSO, I think it applies to many people who attend concerts of avant-garde (for want of a better term) music and cheer the music to the roof. Liking Boulez and denigrating Britten becaomes a cultural act and a badge of identity, rather than a purely musical judgement.
This is absolutely true; the people with whom i can talk about my enjoyment of Richard Barrett, Horatiu Radulescu and Toshio Hosokawa are disdainful if i happen to mention that i also like Christopher Rouse—and vice versa. There's a need to denigrate certain composers (the likes of Britten for the avant-gardists, the likes of Boulez for the traditionalists) out of a kind of siege mentality born, i think, from the belief that classical music is in decline and only their particular faction can save it.
i think both sides adopt certain kinds of music as standards to bear in this faction war. For the people on this forum it's the hundreds of little-known twentieth-century symphonists who worked in relatively traditional, tonal styles, whom you adopt in an effort to fight the prevailing cultural narrative that all such music became irrelevant when Schoenberg first set pen to paper; to the degree that if someone wanted to upload a rare work by a little-known twelve-note composer there'd be a very real sense that such contributions weren't welcome (though that's not in fact the case, and composers like Ralph Shapey do figure in the download archives, although with disclaimers). For other people it's the Wandelweiser composers, or the new complexity school, or free improvisers or les acousmatiques or Stockhausen. All of whom will definitely save classical music from whatever its problem is.
