“It is the brain’s correlations of sensory information that create the knowledge we have about our surroundings, such as the sounds of words and music, the images we see in paintings and photographs, the colors we perceive: ‘perception is not merely a reflection of immediate input,’ [Gerald] Edelman and [Giulio] Tononi write [in A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination], ‘but involves a construction or a comparison by the brain.’ “
That paragraph comes from a long review of neuroscience books from last 
summer by Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff, and I started wondering about the correlations between their visual example, and that of hearing. If our brains are responsible for creating the visual world, and that world is not actually in existence outside of our minds, and, furthermore, we lean on what the brain has already compared and declared (to itself) to be true, what does this mean for how we perceive music?
This could explain the difficulty of attracting listeners to modern music significantly more than its dissonance, or its volume, or any other trait that could be brought forward. Perhaps it’s simply (as simple as anything involving the brain’s processing can be, at least) the lack of an adequate frame of reference among listeners. And if our brains lack the previous input required to catalog and interpret what is coming in, the immediate reaction will be one of incomprehension. In that case, it’s entirely warranted, because there’s no basis for any comprehension to take place.
What started me thinking of all this was pianist Alexandre Tharaud’s new recording of Erik Satie’s music, and an experience I had about ten years ago. I was driving somewhere with my dad, who’s a historian without musical training. He sings in church and went to all of my band and orchestra concerts, but seeking out the new and revolutionary in the sonic arts is not high on his list of priorities. I put Aldo Ciccolini’s classic Satie recording on in the car stereo, and the First Gymnopedie started. After a couple minutes, he asked me to turn it off, saying that he couldn’t make sense of it.
Erik Satie
Now, among the aficionadoes, Satie is hardly difficult. He uses all the chords, but shuffles the sequence they’re usually heard in, along with the standard 4/4 meter. (Or 3/4 if we’re still talking about that Gymnopedie.) If you’re used to the chords and the sequence, Satie pushes you ever so slightly out of your comfort zone. But if you force Satie to meet you more than halfway, his music can’t, and you’ll end up like Dad, floundering in a sea of strangeness.
Since we do make sense of our environments with our eyes, mostly, they become more adapted and better-suited to comparing what new stimuli they receive with what they’ve already filed away. But since we don’t use our ears in nearly such a focused way, they are unable to process something new as easily as our eyes.
Which makes me wonder how much an average concertgoer is actually listening to a live concert, if we hold in our mind the image of our ears hearing something new and then comparing it against previous experiences. Do people actually hear the Beethoven symphony, or do they hear the first several times it was on the radio and became ingrained in their mind? Do they hear the phrasing adopted by this conductor, and how different it is from the first time? And since they have never heard the piece getting its first performance by the orchestra, or a new work’s premiere, how much are they (we!) really able to understand it?
(I write this saying that understanding is the least important aspect of listening to concert music. It should say something to you that you can appreciate. Understanding can come later.)
I don’t know the answer, but one of the more intriguing points made by Daniel J. Levitin in This Is Your Brain on Music was that, based on the measureable brain activity, it “was nearly impossible to tell from the data whether people were listening to or imagining music. The pattern of brain activity was virtually indistinguishable.” Could it be that as we listen to music, we’re really just remembering something we heard before, or simply realigning what we have heard to account for this new music?