A review of David Stubbs, Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen? Why do people flock to see abstract art but run screaming from ‘abstract music’? Here’s a book that asks the question of why avant-garde music has “failed to attain the audience, the cachet, the legitimacy of its visual equivalent”, and why “The same people who flock from miles around to mill in the presence of abstract art run screaming, hands clasped to their ears like Munch females, from ‘abstract music’.”