But "Seven States of Rain" (and there are many worse) tells the listener nothing except that the composer is rather pretentious.
I'm largely with you up to that point... but then the iceberg starts to melt for me.
What is that makes "Seven States Of Rain" pretentious (if, let us say, the composer seriously intended to portray different kinds of precipitation as music), but "Four Sea Interludes" is perfectly fine? Or indeed,
Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the countryside ?
I can't help feeling that the criteria here are not being used in a fair and comparable way. Works we know (and, perhaps, love) are allowed to have 'programmatic' titles - but works (or composers) we sneer at are denied the same right. The example of Herodotus is very telling, since appeals to classical antiquity (no matter how tenuous in reality) have long been a handy get-out. Stravinsky, for example, could be accused of getting away with blue murder in this area ;) Yet had the composer of "Seven States Of Rain" only named their piece
La Tempestata di Mare, they would already be on the A-Level Set Works list.
This, however, may reflect our ingrained tendency to adore the old, and deride the new - regardless of actual merits, and it might well be a societal prejudice. There's even a website which officially (!) derides music written after 1918, for example.
