This article reveals conflicting goals: "...we should take an ethnomusicological approach" vs. "It would be better to have some hard data on what we all collectively think makes for valid music" Embracing musical balkanization akin to Los Angeles in contrast to distilling musical practice akin to the melting pot of New York City. I am much more supportive of the former approach yet it is impractical when representing musical form in a rightly finite curriculum. It requires a more decentralized effort, and students receive a scatterplot of perspectives. Perhaps sharing the extraordinary depth of theory and musicology focussed on canonical artists such as Beethoven isn't so bad after all. Though I have personally challenged professors who dished it to me repeatedly. I think there are serious feasibility issues with effectively addressing timbre as a musical dimension; this is problematic for adequate theories of music given the centrality of timbre in many forms of modern music. However, it remains embarrassing for the academy not to be able to coherently address what is so obviously saturating their students ears.