A new book by Philip Ball, The Music Instinct, suggests that audiences can find atonal music difficult because they can't recognise the patterns in it.
Of course atonal music contains patterns, though they're rooted in rhythm, timbre and, particularly, melody, rather than tonal harmony.
Dr Timothy Jones, deputy principal at the Royal Academy of Music, told the Telegraph that, "I would question how much of the familiarity with the music of Mozart and Bach has to do with culturalisation rather than an innate cognitive inability to understand the music of composers like Schoenberg. Certain people can learn to appreciate it."
Certain people like musicians, perhaps? And could that be why they demonstrate more enthusiasm than civilians? Not just taste, or familiarity, or open-mindedness, but hard-wired ability to comprehend?
