Many composers come into music through the world of 19th-century music, and most music schools put a pretty strong focus on Romanticism, and there's one aspect of Romanticism that survived through all the vicissitudes of 20th century style change pretty much intact: many, many composers aim in their music for a kind of organic emotional curve whereby the music spends most of its time either crescendoing or decrescendoing in intensity, with some sense of climax and often resolution, often symbolized by increasing dissonance or complexity. Of course there's nothing wrong with this, and it describes a lot of great music. But if there is a privileged paradigm that subconsciously represents normalcy to many musicians, this is how I would characterize it. The deliberate avoidance of this paradigm, the rejection of its premises, is one of the sins committed by the so-called "American Maverick" composers (Cage, Harrison, Young, Tenney) and continued by many of us, their faux maverick acolytes.

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