jujimufu

Well, you've set up a good question here. Let me ask you a question: do you think that you like and enjoy classical/romantic harmonies naturally? Do you think that if you were born in an experimental room, with no contact to music, and then they played you a piece by Bach and a piece by Schoenberg, that you would prefer the Bach one? Do you think that if you had grown up in a world where every musical thing was "atonal" (say, in the sense of the few middle Schoenberg pieces), like commercials, soundtracks, pop music, everything, do you believe that if you listened to a piece by Mozart then you'd say "oh my god, that is so much more beautiful than what we've been listening to!"? Do you think that if you were born in India, and had absolutely no contact with Western music whatsoever, and grew up listening to Indian music and ragas, you'd find the Western writing system to not be abstract and that a piece by Mozart would make more sense than a piece by Feldman (not to say that Feldman is atonal)?

Or is it that you've grown up in an environment and you had tonality forced upon you, due to various commercial and other reasons for which tonality has persisted so much in the popular world (and it's not just tonality that doesn't make it an incredibly artistic scene, but anyway, let's stick to tonality for now)? You're taking a very much defensive approach to "atonality", or anything that is not strictly (or less strictly, in case of romanticism) tonal.

Yes, it is true that the interval of a perfect fifth is natural in terms of waves and harmonic partials etc. And that is also true, the fifth has been an important interval throughout history, and also throughout various cultures in the world, and their history. However, the tempered 5th is slightly different than the pythagorean/just intonation 5th, which is supposed to be the "natural" one. Even so, one cannot claim that human beings find the 5th "more pleasurable" than, say, a tritone, because although the 5th will be a more regular wave and the tritone.

And what about people who enjoy music that is not tonal equally to music that is tonal? What about people who actually enjoy listening to a tritone as much as they do listening to a perfect fifth? Where do they belong? Are they unnatural products of small avant-garde circles in societies?

Also, your mention of the proms and that mostly romantic music dominates throughout the proms is fallacious (link and link). Just because such an event is organised by the BBC (and thus has a degree of "..success and popularity"), and just because most of the works played are classical/romantic/late romantic, that doesn't mean that contemporary music is not valid, or that classical/romantic/late romantic music is more valid/true than contemporary/modern music.

On what grounds? If you try and compare an Intel 8080 processor to an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ processor, well, obciously enough the AMD processor is way "better" than the Intel one. However, we're taking things out of context here, because back in the 70's, when the 8080 processor was released, it was pretty much the state of art, as much as the state of art now is that AMD processor (or if not the particular model, then it's respective counterpart).

Just like you can't take science out of context, you can't take music out of context, or anything really out of its cultural and historical context (that also applies to the thread about 4'33", because apparently SimenN decided to ignore a whole school of music and a whole man's life and experiences when he attacked Cage's 4'33" in the other thread).