Rubato

Over the past century music has been going through many changes, our traditional systems are being thrown out as people are opting for more anti-conventional techniques. While this has brought us much innovation it seems to have crippled the expressive nature of music as composers are now attempting to be innovative for the sake of being innovative; the goal of composition seems to have become a need for someone to make a name for them-selves rather than simply to express.

Any sound has the ability to conjure up images, this is fairly evident and while playing a cactus with a feather may be thinking outside the box, is a demonstration of that the be all and end all of it? Would Debussy running up and down the whole-tone scale have been as acceptable as his finished works?

To make matters worse the over eagerness for innovation has brought with it some massive misconceptions. When Schoenberg seen the direction music was clearly taking and decided to hop the barrier with his emancipation of dissonance he created quite a stir, out of this we ended up with atonality - a term that makes no sense but somehow managed to become standardised through much use before anyone could argue the concept. To use his own criticism against him from his Harmonielehre when mentioning his distaste for the way students were being taught modulation.
"of course one can reach the street faster by leaping from the fifth floor than by going down the stairs - but in what condition! Thus it is not a matter of the shortest way but of the practical, the appropriate way. And only that way can be practical and appropriate which weighs the possible connections between point of departure and destination and then chooses intellectually"

If music was heading in a direction where all relationships from each note to each other was to become easily understood why force it? would the best method not have been to just let it come about naturally? instead we force our audience to work towards understanding these new relationships when they aren't even fully understood by those using them. Surely the point of art is to minimize subjectivity so you can get your point across (in my view anyway).

So have we gotten to the point where the idea has become the finished product, rather than after it has been put to practical use, Where music has been reduced to lab work or am I just a crazy pony unable to grasp the complexities of modernism?