I think the quote that Matt referenced from John Adams, about suggesting a drum beat instead of actually using one, is interesting as it is certainly a generational thing. Maybe years ago composers had to hide their ‘intermusical’ love of pop music, by cloaking it, but today the miscegenation ‘laws’ are repealed; now, what’s wrong with a direct usage of a drum beat, if that is what the piece needs? Instead of playing compositional games by going around using a drum beat, I think most of today’s younger (or youngish) composers don’t see anything wrong with just using the drum beat and don’t really beat themselves up about it. I mean sometimes a direct proposition is more visceral, meaningful, and differently gets the point across more so than innuendo. And beyond some of the critics and the hipsters, who cares if the pop music influence is on the surface, below, or there at all, as long as the music connects with or moves listeners. When I hear ‘compositional rigor’ and ‘uncompromising’ both sound like code words to me, suggesting that somehow those ‘wild’ and ‘unsophisticated’ more popular forms need the elevated and moderating influence of the great ‘classical’ music to make it palatable. No wonder only a percentage of a percentage is actually listening to the music.

One of the things that I think is great about the best music from the minimalist founding fathers like Reich (and later ‘children’ like Adams) is that their pop and jazz influences, while sometimes readily apparent in surface structure, are mostly subsumed into their own personal language. And this is one reason I call the ‘style’ mixed music (which has been the subject of one of my Composer Salons), because like mixed race children, something different is created that is both and neither of the ‘source material.’

I think another issue is something George hints at in his response is, what does the all of this mixed music mean? what is it trying to say, beyond just a mash-up (however organically and artfully done) of genres and styles? I wonder if “recent large-scale works that blur the line between pop and classical and are incredibly complex and meticulously organized” have any deeper meanings beyond being complex and organized? Is our built in obsolescence age, where things are forgotten as quickly as they are written, a hindrance to some of the mixed music being remembered 50 years from now, referring to that Norman Lebrecht debate a while ago?

Thanks for the thought-provoking post.

That Fritz the Cat bit is great.

RE: electronica, it really depends. Amon Tobin was pretty popular amongst jazzers in the 90′s, for fairly self-evident reasons. In the early 2000′s, people went for Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. Lately, I’m not really sure… at any rate, jazz musicians respond to complex, syncopated rhythms even if they are programmed to be straight down the middle of the beat, so long as there is still an overall sense of ebb and flow going on. It’s more stuff like the unrelenting, on-the-nose boosh boosh boosh bass drum in, e.g., House music that really runs counter to jazz sensibilities.

Western art music is still dealing with the legacy of academic dogma and serialism, and the hangover has yet to fully dissipate. When it will, this debate will end. Although I’d like to start up a new one: I actually hear too much self-consciousness in these attempts, it’s the self-consciousness of saying ‘there’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing.’ I hear some lack of confidence.

What matters to me though, in the long view, is that contemporary pop music is quantifiably different than that of previous generations. I’m as much, or more, of a fan of complexity in beats, timbres and electronic production than the next guy, and I think Kraftwerk is a better pop band than the Beatles, but fundamentally it’s about songs. And music has a particular strength when it comes to songs, and that’s harmony. Brahms, Mahler, Gershwin, Arlen all used harmony to express their ideas about the words; if you’re working with words, then you had better have some thoughts about them and you had better tell me what those are, and harmony is still the single greatest, most expressive means for that. What I hear a lot of is that composers seem to admire pop music that features of lack of affect and they emulate that same quality, eviscerating the power of song and taking, I’m more and more convinced, an untenable moral stand in terms of aesthetic values. Tell me something to agree or disagree with, don’t cop-out with a stance. A recent release in a multi-volume set of songs from poetry, a king of alt-classical-jazz thing, is in my opinion a complete failure because it tells me nothing, it’s all surface. Music is not a living room set from Ikea, put something on it.

I think these are actual, serious problems: simplistic harmonies and lack of commitment to meaning. Perhaps composer who want to write unselfconscious pop songs should listen to a broader and deeper range of pop. “I Was Looking At The Ceiling …” works because Adams has a truly broad, deep, unselfconscious range of pop music to draw from. When I was a working jazz musician, I was playing a huge range of pop music, from the 1920s to the 1990s, but given a choice we kept playing certain things again and again, like “Stardust,” because the harmonies were so full of material and ideas, they went far afield and still came back to an incredibly strong anchor. I cannot think other than that harmony is the most important element in any kind of song, and composers dumb down their harmonies at their own peril.

But your larger point about the unrecognized levels of complexity, such as groove, is really astute. I wonder if jazz folks more often have issues with electronica, since a lot of its rhythm tends to be gridded pretty squarely?

And by the way, the Bo Diddly talk reminds me of this awesome transition scene from one of my favorite movies, Fritz the Cat, where he just plays that groove as a character snaps along: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovnzEGEFQrg
It’s beautiful.