>Some art is "challenging", but still artistically uninteresting and uninspired.
I agree and would include 12 tone music (and specifically the Darmstadt School) in this category, as well as others like Xenakis. I think they should have been laughed out of performance halls and shunned, just like so many hack musicians were pre-20th century before classical music lost its gatekeepers (almost all art did with the death of modernism and the fragmentation of cultural narratives)
I think Handel is still a rough choice. He was more popular than Bach, but only because Bach was writing in somewhat outmoded styles for his time. Handel worked for aristocratic (and sometimes royal, see: the backstory of his Water Music as a way to repair relations with the new king of England) patrons and thus had to keep up with fashion. It was never about mass appeal but about making the person with the purse strings happy for Handel.
I see your point there regarding the money/power of the audience being a substitute for popularity with different interests, weakening my claim that Händel would've been "like a pop musician" at his times".
Sure, the comparison was probably painted with a brush that was too broad, thus flawed.
I should have gone into some more detail there regarding the music patronage demography
I agree and would include 12 tone music (and specifically the Darmstadt School) in this category, as well as others like Xenakis. I think they should have been laughed out of performance halls and shunned, just like so many hack musicians were pre-20th century before classical music lost its gatekeepers (almost all art did with the death of modernism and the fragmentation of cultural narratives)
I think Handel is still a rough choice. He was more popular than Bach, but only because Bach was writing in somewhat outmoded styles for his time. Handel worked for aristocratic (and sometimes royal, see: the backstory of his Water Music as a way to repair relations with the new king of England) patrons and thus had to keep up with fashion. It was never about mass appeal but about making the person with the purse strings happy for Handel.