Perhaps I should stick to Bach cantatas...
This is not a bad strategy, I know a lot of academics and composers -- and one or two listeners -- for whom they discover an entire universe in a microcosm: they prefer depth of understanding rather than breadth: audiophiles especially like to skitter wildly from genre to genre; the former look at the commonalities and differences that separate interpretations from one another.
I could (and sometimes do) spend weeks doing this (and I do not produce music in any "normal" sense*) and it is incredibly useful to listen to as many variations as possible and ask oneself what the impositions and suppositions are that led to one particular interpretation (generally more insightful to a practitioner than some perverse "emotional response" based on how you are feeling rather than what you are understanding); Bach's cantatas are a great example -- in 40 years I can think of about half a dozen varying (academically supported at the time -- and Bach musicology is ongoing) ideas of what continuo is and to what level it ought to be applied, it is far more revealing to dig into the cultural and technical and historical musicology of our understanding of a work rather than some pornographic "emotional response" I see trotted out repeatedly as a proxy for understanding.
A lot of the time people express very wide tastes in music but show almost no knowledge of the music they listen to, simply expressing a set of responses to what they are hearing, (as if that is informative, helpful or even invited by the composer). I am interested in the curious and those who are forever asking "why do I derive insight from [this] and not [that]?" What is the component in this set of sometimes arranged sounds that gravitates me to performance [x] rather than performance [y]? What are the fundamental beliefs I have about this music and what are they based on? Can they be supported?
The subject of "what is and what is not [music]" is too big for our species to adequately address and I stopped a long time ago when I got dizzy chasing my tail. One could spend probably a lifetime defending the notion that every single oscillation in the universe is inseparable from music, (but I prefer wilful snubbing of current popular aesthetics and aleatoric indeterminacy over Bach's shoehorning of music into a system of even temperament), which has so limited the development of music for the past few hundred years, so it is no wonder why 70s rock bands whom all stand in the shoes of varying folk musics are treading on each other's feet.
Bach, it has to be said was a normal career musician and kapellmeister who needed patronage so was bound by writing what worked and what did not... So he himself had to play the 'give the punters what they like' and the 'hey look at meeeee' game and that means to a certain degree be equal parts novel and derivative.
Eventually composers who tap at the edges of music as an art in and of itself hit a cold implacable wall and how (or if) we choose to go beyond it or stay behind its safe historical confines defines us and our relationship with notions of systems that define music more than the music itself.
*I expect a lawsuit from a neutron star in a few billion years time.
