Good music should touch your soul and bring over sentiments... I can't say that any experimental music ever did that to me..

Yet, some people love jazz, which I don't... so who's to say what's good and what isn't... 

Paul,

There's certainly a market for it these days, but it doesn't ring my bell. Boulez the conductor is a different beast to Boulez the composer, and he learned that the hard way when he was chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the 70s. Audiences stayed away from concert halls in droves when he performed his own music and he's very much more successful these days as a conductor of Mahler and Schoenberg where there is a hold on tonality (albeit tenuous in Schoenberg's case). Stockhausen is even more alien to my ears, with some of his earlier stuff resembling the kind of music-less bleeps and squeaks that you can hear from a supermarket cash register.

Cage made something of a laughing stock of himself recently when he arranged his 'four minutes thirty three seconds' for orchestra from the original piano, so for me his credibility is now even further out of the window.

Berio is a little different - have you heard his Sinfonia? It's cleverly put together, with great bleeding chunks of the Mahler Resurrections symphony and Debussy's La Mer (plus some others) making guest appearances.

One modernist that I have a sneaking admiration for is Edgard Varese (the Varese Sarabande record label was named after him) whose output is individual to say the least. Apart from the 'musique concrete' of the Poeme Electronique, one of the most individual of his pieces is Ionisation, written completely for 13 percussionsist playing 36 different percussion instruments in 1933, and inspired by molecular ionisation(?!). Rumour has it that it was this piece that made Frank Zappa take up music.

Otherwise, I've tended to stay tonal, following Mahler and Ravel through to Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

I guess it's all about what is 'good' music, and to me good music is what I like, and bad music is what I don't like. I like jazz, I like the Beatles and Pink Floyd, I appreciate Metallica and the Eagles, but can't get on with rap (where there seems to be a silent 'c' missing). However, there's nothing like the hue and cry of a symphony orchestra to send a shiver up my back - but playing tonal music rather than our friends Boulez and Stockhausen.

I can hear the knives sharpening already...

Allegro con anima!

No offense intended John, and none taken, I'm sure. I like Wagner operas but can't abide rap, and it's certain that there are those whose views are diametrically opposed - but that's fine, of course. It makes music as diverse in its appeal as it should be.

Just as I like JS Bach keyboard (especially played by Glenn Gould or Murray Perahia), but am not convinced that Mozart was the genius he's normally made out to be.

Life's funny, ain't it!

Agree with you 100% about Brian Eno, Rotty - the man's talented.

It's not the tunes that Mozart gets wrong, or the technique (he put a twelve-tone row into his 40th symphony more than 100 years before Schoenberg 'thought it up') - I guess maybe he was born a hundred years too early?