Source: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (1 ed. 2007; but 2008 Reprint ed. exists). p. 483 Middle.
Although Cage avoided tonality and repetition in his music from 1950 onward, he hovered over the radical end of American music as a liberating spirit. He had done the preliminary work of dismantling the European "vogue of profundity," as he called it. In 1952, he scan- dalized a crowd at Black Mountain College by saying that Beethoven had misled generations of composers by structuring music in [1.] goal-oriented harmonic narratives [End of 1.] instead of letting it unfold moment by moment. At a New York gathering, he was heard to say, "Beethoven was wrong!" The poet John Ashbery overheard the remark, and for years afterward wondered what Cage had meant. Eventually, Ashbery approached Cage again. "I once heard you say something about Beethoven," the poet began, "and I've always wondered—" Cage's eyes lit up. "Beethoven was wrong!" he exclaimed. "Beethoven was wrong!" And he walked away.
What does 1 mean? The bolded appears too terse and vague to me.