To say "Beethoven was wrong!

" could just be a delightfully confrontational

statement, designed to unsettle and make you wonder what he meant, and wonder about
what both Beethoven and Cage thought music should be (which has obviously worked!).

As I understand it, Beethoven would just be the most famous example, because all
classical music is "wrong" in the sense that its unfolding is planned. It's goal-
oriented. It's like a novel or a folk tale, which has a beginning, middle and end,
and (often, moreover) an implied moral - good defeats evil, just as consonance
defeats dissonance. We're led by the hand down the garden path, and - although the
route might be twisty, sometimes scary - we're know where we going to end up: back
home, safe and sound.
Wagner started to break down that predictability, of course, and 20thC composers
went further - just as 20thC writers (like James Joyce) did, recognising that the
old predictable narratives were either no longer socially relevant, or their tricks
were too familiar to provide enough drama. Painters and composers alike developed a
kind of "impressionism", eschewing narrative (clear representation) to focus on
expression of mood or feeling, investigating the nature of the medium itself,
rather than taking it for granted. IOW, music changed from being a means to end
(sounds in the service of a "tale") to the sounds being the end in themselves -
just as abstract painting became about the painting itself, not about using paint
to represent something else.
As Stravinsky said, "music expresses nothing but itself".

The modal jazz musicians did something similar, throwing out the narratives of
tonal chord progressions to explore static harmony. Obviously the "serious" art
composers were several steps ahead of all that, ultimately with Cage's
conceptualism, which even attempted to remove the composer's intention from the
scene, let alone the traditional elements of scale, harmony and rhythm.

Music "unfolding moment by moment" would be music where you have no idea where it
might be going. Nothing is set up or established at the beginning, in order for it
then to be "developed". So you are given no expectations. You may still have
expectations - because that's what you expect of music - but essentially all you
have to do is pay attention.
That was the genius of 4'33" - it forced you - by being presented as a musical work
in a concert hall, with a pianist sitting at a piano - to pay attention, and so
hear sounds you wouldn't normally pay attention to, and would normally, in fact,
experience as distracting. The point was to "open the ears", to expand the
imagination. There are things worth listening to all around us, all the time. The
concert hall is a bizarrely artificial environment. (It doesn't have to be, but had
become that.)

In a sense, of course, any kind of music involves an act of paying attention in a

particular way, outside of usual experience. Unlike any other art form, it's
nothing but sound, and is totally dependent on the time dimension. Cinema and
theatre depend on time too, but only music controls time, mediates time, makes us
think about time.
Tonal music, like Beethoven's, presents us with a kind of pre-digested timescale, a
huge edifice of time-based elements at different scales, all carefully measured
out. To appreciate it fully, we need to hold these various timescales in our heads:
beats, bars, motifs, themes, sections, movements. And then appreciate how
everything falls into its allotted space. (The word "movement" is especially
resonant.)

In contrast, Cage was saying that music should not be like that. It should not
restrict our imagination (and our attention) in that way, forcing us to follow the
composer's instructions (which instruct the listener as much as they do the
performers).
The implication, after all, is that the composer has some special message, a result
of his unique genius, that he is about to reveal to us, in order to educate us, to
elevate our spirit, to exalt our humanity. That's the Romantic myth (from which our
culture still suffers to some degree): a singular genius with a hotline to God,
producing something transcendent from his fevered brow (it's always "his" btw,
rarely "her").

Part of Cage's purpose was to demolish that myth, which is peculiar to European
culture, particularly Christian industrial Europe.

IMO, it's not that Beethoven was "wrong", or had "misled" anyone in any deliberate
way. He made the music he wanted to at that time, according to how he was paid, or
how he felt, or both. There were definite social purposes to a lot of his music (it
wasn't just "self-expression").
What's misleading is the notion that that kind of music (the classical/Romantic
symphony in particular) represents a pinnacle of musical achievement, that its aims
should be the aims of all music.

Of course, we can still see Cage as an inheritor of the "musical genius" tradition,
the elitist composer, despite his attempts to escape that. Beethoven's music
requires one kind of attention. Cage's requires another. They are both in the ivory
tower (even if it's us that put them there). There are other forms of music (other
cultures, our own popular musics) requiring different kinds of attention, equally
valid.