Schoenberg and Webern frighten audiences because their music is understood too correctly

Evidence

The terror which Schoenberg and Webern spread, today as in the past, comes not from their incomprehensibility but from the fact that they are all too correctly understood. Their music gives form to that anxiety, that terror, that insight into the catastrophic situation which others merely evade by regressing. They are called individualists, and yet their work is nothing but a single dialogue with the powers which destroy individuality - powers whose ‘formless shadows’ fall gigantically on their music. In music, too, collective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 112

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the standard complaint against atonal music — incomprehensibility is a defense, not a flaw — and ends in a paradox where only doomed individuals can represent collectivity. Dense enough to sit with.