Voyeurs. Stalkers. Biography readers.

I do not know which hand Tchaikovsky favored for the act of self-gratification.  I doubt anyone knows.  Still, it is conceivable (if by now very unlikely) that evidence concerning Tchaikovsky’s preference in that area may one day come to light.  Say, a fortuitously discovered letter from the composer’s brother Modest to one of Modest’s lovers in which it is mentioned that Tchaikovsky was a lefty.  Supposing this were to happen tomorrow, would you expect to read about Tchaikovsky’s left-handed masturbation in the composer’s updated biographies?

Two cheers for tabloid musicology!

The experience to which Mr. Carter's music gives authoritative access is that of belonging to a self-congratulating coterie, lately beside itself with rage at its loss of power to tyrannize the classical music community.
RICHARD TARUSKIN, letter to the Editor, New York Times, 27 July 1997.*
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There is no denying that the musicologist Richard Taruskin's cantankerous, pugnacious writing style can be refreshingly entertaining in today's climate of PC Jihadism, where sharply negative criticism is readily equated with bullying.  And when such criticism is directed at the works of those who happened not to be white heterosexual gentile males, the critic may end up with the career-destroying label of enemy of diversity, inclusion, equity, sustainability, social justice, and other Stalinist linguistic contortions whose meanings are known only to delusional academics, useless bureaucrats, and self-righteous Silicon Valley nerds.

When Carter got Shiffted

... chaotic, unpredictable... There are no themes and no 'form'.
David Schiff on Elliott Carter's Partita for Orchestra (1993), The Music of Elliott Carter, 2nd ed., Cornell U. Press, 1998, p.318.
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Musicologists... the forensic pathologists of music who dissect musical works, examine the innards, and describe their findings in reports the general public never reads.  Except, that is, for occasional voyeuristic freaks like myself.  In our case, however, the motivation is not some morbid obsession of a man perusing reports from the Coroner's Office, but a harmless (if not particularly healthy) obsession with the music we find exceptionally rewarding.

One of those absurdly overcomposed monstrosities

i)  ... eccentric without being amusing; and laborious without effect.

ii)  ... a crass monstrosity.

iii)  ... oh, the pages of stupid and hopelessly vulgar music!

iv)  ... eccentric, unconnected, and incomprehensible ... wanting in aesthetical feeling and in a sense of the beautiful ... monstrous and tasteless.

Stretching to the very last year of the 19th century, these dismissive criticisms of Beethoven's symphonies[1] show that even the long-term reception of a musical work is a very poor indicator of the work's artistic significance.  Where is today the once so successful and praised music of Hasse, Hummel, or Dittersdorf?  By contrast, there isn't a major orchestra these days whose season programs do not include Mahler's symphonies - the symphonies which half a century after their premieres were still dismissed by major music critics as "cheap", "banal", "interminable platitudes".[2]