Melody and Avant-Garde Notational music

Okay. So I admit, one of the big reasons I want on that two-post rant about how 'classical music' is a really inappropriate term is so I could could post this, and not be annoyed by being forced to use dumb terms.

I came across this while reading an issue of Gramophone (an ironic name since they're a magazine devoted to what I call 'notational' music). It's two composers talking about the perils of using melody in modern notational music, and I found it interesting. In talking about why there's so little melody, so little tunes one can sing or hum, in modern/avant-garde notational music, they're getting right to the heart of why it's so 'hard' and inaccessible to most people, in a very practical way.

"I do admit to a sadness that we have almost lost the permission to include a tune that the world will remember in a contemporary concert composition... I don't think creative artists and certainly not many of the critical fraternity have really accepted the artistic consequences of social and political democracy. Most of our ideas of high art are still formed in a pre-democratic age -- when not many people had access to arts and culture. I wonder if we haven't got to make some sort of re-adjustment for the fact that many people now have access to music. Of course that audience -- those who perhaps haven't studied music deeply, but none the less love it -- is being catered to (I suppose you'd say that's what pop music's for, or musical theatre, or Raymond Gubbay concerts of favourite classics) but I just wonder whether there might be room for new composers to find something that will transcend these boundaries of taste and education.
"Having said that, I absolutely respect the right of every composer to write music they have to write. Composers stand somewhere in the spectrum of being explorers or magpies. Those who are called to explore and discover new sound worlds and new structures must do that. Those of us that are really magpies just gather sounds in the air from wherever they come and use them to just fill in their nest and make something of it. And I would like there to be a bit more permission for magpies."
- Choral composer John Rutter.

The other composer, Julian Anderson, had this theory that maybe in the wake of the two world wars, "idealism become discredited to a degree that immediate access to emotion of melody" was viewed with suspicion and could no longer be allowed. He said today, composers need to
get beyond this taboo, but without ignoring "the marvellous side of what came up between 1950 and 1970 [in avant-garde music] in terms of colour, harmony, texture, and so on."

(It was the March 2008 edition of Gramophone if you really must know, and the interview was called "Where are today's tunes?").