This is me entirely.
Weird isn’t it?
To some extent, all of the above.
This isn’t a band, but a type of music.
I can’t get on with music that has been composed according to some “system”, like 12-tone rows or linear progressions, or modern pieces where you are supposed to hear some theme in augmented retrograde a tri-tone higher in a different instrument 80 measures later. No one can hear such a thing. Clearly, all music has structure, but most Western music falls into structures that you can readily perceive if you listen closely, and the way that a composer plays with those structures and the listener’s expectations regarding the same often contributes to the emotional and communicative power of a piece. Sure, I can perform a linear analysis on a piece of music and identify tone rows, etc., but if I have to spend hours studying a score in order to explain what the music is “doing” because my ears can’t perceive it, what is the point? It is just mental gymnastics, not music, and such pieces usually sound like they were composed by a computer, if not a committee. In the mid-to-late 20th century in particular, there were way too many “composers” who were really just academicians and technicians.