That might have been true in the 19th century. (Although Bach, infamously, uses some pretty advanced harmony that stands up very well against modern harmony).
I think you're spot on with learned cultural expectation though. As a musician, you have to learn how to hear quartal harmony and polychord harmony. The sounds and the logic of how things fit together are different from triadic harmonic theory. As an audience, though, I think you're probably so used to quartal harmony and (to a slightly lesser extent) polychord harmony that I don't think you'd find it at all unusual to hear a chord without a third in it.
That particular chunk of harmonic theory was added near the end of the 19th century by composers like Debussy, and subsequently became completely embedded in hollywood movie music, so you are completely culturally used to it. You probably wouldn't even notice that what you're listening to has no 3rd. 19th century audiences weren't so comfortable about it.
The only real problem is that classical music theory gets quite broken when it comes to quartal and polychordal music. No accident, because compositional techniques involving quartal and polychordal music were deliberately designed to get away from classical music theory.
I think you're spot on with learned cultural expectation though. As a musician, you have to learn how to hear quartal harmony and polychord harmony. The sounds and the logic of how things fit together are different from triadic harmonic theory. As an audience, though, I think you're probably so used to quartal harmony and (to a slightly lesser extent) polychord harmony that I don't think you'd find it at all unusual to hear a chord without a third in it.
That particular chunk of harmonic theory was added near the end of the 19th century by composers like Debussy, and subsequently became completely embedded in hollywood movie music, so you are completely culturally used to it. You probably wouldn't even notice that what you're listening to has no 3rd. 19th century audiences weren't so comfortable about it.
The only real problem is that classical music theory gets quite broken when it comes to quartal and polychordal music. No accident, because compositional techniques involving quartal and polychordal music were deliberately designed to get away from classical music theory.