A born native music speaker isn't really in control of their musical philosophy; it's inbuilt, it's their autonomic shadow, it reveals a lot more about their musical soul than they think they're allowing for in their heartfelt statements of it as  ingratiations, their  propaganda. Self-aggrandizing but devastatingly self-revealing: your idea of what's ingratiating gives you helplessly away; your strenuous conspiracy to control the identity of your presence is totally out of your control, turns out it controls you totally, reveals everything about you by what it shows you think will make a good metaphysical alibi to cover your ass with glory. I notice: wow that isn't what I would say if I wanted to look good. So your philosophy, that is to say your mortal soul, is pretty much immutable: Prokofiev jumped back to the Soviet Union (the Mexican League of music culture) and played goodboy Socialist Realist - total reversal right? Except that his Stalinist music was like an x-ray of all of his previous music, his scintillating modernist dazzlers, smoking out their inner dancehall floozy under their smashing take-no-prisoner surfaces. (The First Violin Concerto and the Classical Symphony escape because they never pretended otherwise in the first place.) The same way that in a huge geological context atonal/twelve-tone music rather than displacing tonality brings out that the soul of tonality rather than fading through its fabled dissolution is actually retro-universalized, revealed as not the whole megilla of a self-contained language but a particular interpretation of the exploded total pitch-intuitive universe all along, special within it, but undeniably sharing all of its determinate-feel-making DNA. You could have known that from Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, had you been free to think or possessed of ahistorical hindsight.  Wouldn't have needed Mahler to provide the deep end for Schoenberg to jump off into.

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