One would have to do an experiment to prove it, but I would guess that if we took two children of today—let’s say two groups—and exposed one group to Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, and the other to Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, there would be a substantial difference in their capacity to comprehend and deal with such musical experience.

Noam Chomsky, ‘The Ideas of Chomsky’, in Bryan Magee (ed.), Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy, London, 1978, p. 218