Music is a fantastic tool for characterization. To draw from the world of television, the character actor Eddie Marsan when playing a character would create a playlist. (From this interview.)

Music is often one of the “technical” tools Marsan uses as a way of finding the tempo of a given character. Happy-Go-Lucky’s gloomy, easily enraged Scott listens to Depeche Mode; Terry, the inarticulate former boxer on Ray Donovan is a “Bruce Springsteen guy”; and the reclusive Norrell on the 19th-century-period BBC show Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell finds solace in baroque classical music. People are influenced subconsciously by the rhythm of the music of the times in which they were raised, Marsan thinks, so if you’re playing someone from a different age, you need to condition yourself accordingly.

An excellent post once again: very intelligent. It's absolutely ridiculous that they'd critique your piece purely on the basis of the music you listened to, and then to go around say that the piece - that same piece, entirely unchanged - would be just fine had it been inspired by Mozart. It seems to me there's a contradiction here. Either the piece is good or it is not, regardless of what music inspired it.