I suppose I could buy an intelligence that doesn’t particularly care about music (as you say, other than a few, most species seem utterly disinterested in music).

What I find unlikely is that a species would just love music and yet never come up with it. Day to day sometimes folks experience randomly musical events, a little random sequence of sounds that happen to exhibit a little rhythm or melody. Surely if they were that captivated by music, they would have latched on to those and played with the concept a bit during their civilisation’s progression…