Expectations

Dislike of a particular style of music has do with expectations, hence it is a feature of the listener and not the music itself.

Now music itself works through setting up expectations and then fulfilling them, or frustrating them for a while before fulfilling them.

There are two levels to that. One is that a composer begins a cadence and then finishes it, for example.  So the 5 chord, for example, will resolve to the 1. The second level is the we expect the music to work like that in general, that there will be such cadences in a piece.  So expectations can be those set up within a composition (micro expectation, or else expectations about what a composition will do (macro).

An example of a micro expectation:  for a given phrase, one can imagine the phrase that ought to answer it.  If such a phrase comes, then there is a satisfaction in that. Imagine that the next phrase, instead of being the logical answer, so to speak, is a random phrase that doesn't seem to fit.

On the macro level, the expectation will be that generally speaking, there will be a certain logic in how phrases relate to each other in this kind of structure.

Imagine if we are used to a certain cadential structure and we hear Debussy for the first time. Now we think this is not how music is supposed to go. We bring expectations to Debussy that he isn't interested in.  But after a while, we form new sets of expectations, and once we recognize that something is Debussy-type music, we expect it to "go" in a certain way.  Seeing a piece of his as a failure to be Beethoven would like seeing an avocado as a failed cup of coffee.

What about "bad" music? Of course we are making judgments all the time, and rightly so. But what kind of judgment is not conditioned by expectation?

With poetry, we also expect certain things to happen. Bad poetry is all about frustrating expectations both on micro and macro level. The poem seems like it will do one thing, and then fails (micro). Or it doesn't conform to what we think a poem ought to be (macro). If we write a bad poem on purpose, then we are playing explicitly with those frustrations.  A bad poem not written on purpose is one by someone who doesn't know how to do it in the first place.