Charles Rosen Quote

It is not, however, the unfamiliarity or strangeness of a work or of a composer's manner that is a bar to understanding, but rather the disappearance of the familiar, the ongoing disappointment of the expectations and hopes fostered by the musical tradition in which we have grown up.

Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense - The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)