I pondered something like this this and googling “why does modern classical music suck so bad?” took me to this five year old question posted on reddit about this twelve year old article on the guardian to which there were many long and esoteric replies.
my response to all that was:
seems like a lot of words. (cf. wolfe’s “the painted word”, or perhaps james brown’s “it’s a man’s man’s man’s world” )
so much explanation is required because everyone’s making up their own formalism.
there used to be rules, you know [reflecting the prevailing religious or clutural worldview]. then people began to bend and break them, in order to produce seomething new, but then those became the new rules. finally there were no rules, and then that became the new rule. except maybe now there’s new rules but only the cool kids know them, and if you don’t know them already, no one is going to tell you what they are.
seems like we’re all looking through the telescope backwards, so to speak, and wondering why everything looks so small.
it’s the recent history across all the self-styled “high” or “fine” arts, visual, musical, solid, dance, literary, etc. the modern, then post-modern form is the result of people self-consciously reacting to a disintegration of what was the mostly european sponsor culture maybe [the romantic movement] foreshadowing in the era of the napoleonic wars, but really getting serious after the first and second world wars, [with] the concomitant economic upheavals and ideological conflicts.
and in that mostly eurocentric frame, a dystopic message might very well predominate over an expression of an affirmative nature, which might be what is implicitly sought in the title question.
as you all are probably aware, musical forms like most art express or react to the values of the culture in which they are embedded. the question of this topic maybe then is improperly framed. maybe the question should rather be: why is “modern classical music” so narrowly defined?