How important is it for composers to learn and understand a lot of music?

I wish I had written down where it was that I heard this story, because now I can't remember. It was a while ago. The story is a parable that applies to all creative people and here's my succint retelling of it.

There was an old farmer who had spent his life toiling the soil, just as his father had before him. He was largely uneducated but had a strange affection for mathematics, of all things.

Having never owned a mathematics textbook and, being far from any city, he never thought of buying one. Yet, he played with his numbers almost every night as a way to relax after a hard day of physical labour.

Over the years, boxes and boxes of papers accumulated, filled with increasingly complex equations. The farmer was now an old man and his sons urged him to bring these papers to the university and show them to the professor there.

So he did. He loaded the boxes unto his truck and drove for more than an hour to see this mathematician who was nice enough to take the time to see him. The old man left the papers there and returned home.

The weeks passed and then , finally the mathematician called. He was astounded! He said the old farmer was a mathematical genius; he had reinvented calculus all on his own!

This is a very sad story. The old man was a genius but because he never bothered to learn what had already been done, he wasted his genius recreating what already existed. And now it was too late to do anything of value.

So yeah, it is very, very important to learn, analyze and assimilate a lot of music.