My friend Marty was describing some "awful" music she had heard, a new work by the American composer Peter Maxwell Davies. The conductor said it was the most complicated piece he had ever directed.

Marty said it hurt her ears. It used rhythmic motifs but lacked melody in the "traditional" sense. It was painful. Was there a program? No. There was no story, no message, no meaning -- not even a purely musical meaning -- to convey. What was wrong and at the same time, why did this piece survive? What type of person would choose to endure such meaningless pain?

There seems to be four overlapping spheres of human essence: the mind or intellect, the body or physical sensuality, the spirit or sense of meaning, and the community or context. Great music appeals to all of these.

The Maxwell Davies piece was complex; the numerical ordering of its elements could only appeal to the intellect. Otherwise, it physically hurt the ears, had no message to communicate, and lacked the sounds normally expected by an audience. It did, however, survived the scrutiny of academic intellectuals, which is enough to keep it in the canon created by academia.