Most artists simply just create the music that they immediately feel they must express, while some do sit and think about what they want their music to do. Both approaches are completely valid and both have their strengths and weaknesses.
A classic pattern in art and music history observed by historians - and probably a general historic pattern - consists of the oscillation between cerebral and sensational forms of music. With cerebral music, the compositions are more complex and measured, and the audience sits and listens, while both thinking about the music and feeling it on an emotional level, but with more meditative and internally directed emotional processes. Then you have sensational music, which is simpler but has an increased emphasis on movement and sensation. The idea is for the audience to move and connect with each other: the music acts both as a stimulant and a social binding agent; it provides a venue for people to come together. The characteristics of these two types are not mutually exclusive, but the two types each place more emphasis on certain characteristics.
Both general forms of music enjoy certain periods of ascendancy when there is more energy and popularity behind a certain style. Cerebral music becomes exhausted when more and more convoluted works are made by increasingly egotistical and self-absorbed artists that fail to see the meaning behind their music, alienating their audiences, which allows sensational music to regain ascendancy by being refreshingly simple (and simplicity doesn't have to indicate a lack of thinking), direct, energetic, and binding. Sensational music is exhausted in turn as the simplicity degenerates to stupidity and the artists become egotistical and hedonistic, alienating their audiences, which in turn allows cerebral music to regain its ascendancy, celebrated for its triumph over the dumb and apathetic.
There are times when the musical types can be combined. Nietzsche attempted to describe this with his early Birth of Tragedy, which didn't exactly address the music scene as we know it now (how could it?); it addressed the phenomenon of the Greek tragedy as an art form. For Nietzsche, there was a constant struggle for representation between the Apollonian and Dionysian art forms. The Apollonian form consisted of light and form: it concerned the construction of distinct, concrete forms out of chaos, while the Dionysian form consisted of darkness and chaos, of the ecstatic retreat into chaos and intoxication.
Statically, each form should detract from the other: as form is constructed out of chaos, order and understanding follows, but the stresses and overcomplexity generated from order and understanding beckons the return of chaos as a release - the chaos always exists outside of the form, ready for resurgence. Conversely, with darkness and chaos comes a tormenting uncertainty that has to be surmounted for life to continue, providing motivation for a new assemblage.
But for Nietzsche there is a time in which these two forces can be united, and that this was the highest form of art. It had to be for him because he saw himself as a whirling concoction of chaos and order, and saw such a marriage as necessary for the progression of humankind, which probably wasn't far off considering the increasingly unstable society he was part of, a society made all the more unstable from a conflicting tension of the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses and their assumed incompatibility.
In Greek tragedy, Nietzsche saw the dialogue and logical narration as the Apollonian impulse, while the actual music in the chorus embodied the Dionysian impulse. I think the motivations behind music itself can be further broken down into the twin impulses, and that this too is a time to think about those motivations.
Everyone has a certain affinity for one of the two impulses, or both. If you create music that indulges both impulses, you are essentially absorbing as many people as you can into your project. If you get as many people of different dispositions communing together around art, or an idea, you get more connections, and more varied connections. And it is always about the people isn't it? About people connecting and belonging?
Besides, now is the time for a little chaos. But not too much! One should think carefully about one's chaos and how much one should indulge in it.
