Music in context vs music in a lab

[Winstontaneous]

Musicologo, you write rambling posts but it's hard to tell what your point is, and for one claiming some sort of meta-perspective I feel like you're quite selective in your references.

Here's the thing...all music is folk music (and all recorded music after the Edison cylinder is electronic music). Looking at the charts this week, Drake - Bruno Mars - Ed Sheeran - Rihanna - Halsey - Migos - whether you like it or not, each is engaging in "natural expressive behaviours and processes in... daily human life." Yes, they're doing it in public with teams of professionals and high budgets - but it is a genuine expression of present humanity within an insane, technologized, smart-but-not-wise overconsumptive global culture continually skirting the edge of irreversible disaster.

Not every consumer is making their own music, but pretty much anyone can be the DJ of their own life. And as KVR shows, there are plenty of us making our own music too with whatever tools are available. I don't see a difference between this and people gathering around a parlor piano in 1890, a sharecropper playing slide guitar on a porch in the 1925, someone wailing on a saxophone in Greenwich Village in the 1960s', or kids using consumer electronic gear to invent hip-hop in the '70s. It's using the technology of the day to meet one's expressive, social, and cultural needs.

When you say things like "Musics becomes defined by the processes and sounds resulting of those contexts. Everything else is put down, repressed, or deemed as irrelevant of study..." you are ignoring the work of prominent musicologists like Susan McClary who focus on how musical practice encodes, reinforces, or challenges notions of sexuality and power relations.

Not to mention the contributions of outstanding practitioners like Brian Eno - who has both created an incredible body of sonic work - and discussed at great length over the past 45+ years the social, cultural, sexual, economic, philosophical, and technological dimensions of musical practice in our time. From Eno's Foreword to Mark Prendergast's "The Ambient Century" (Bloomsbury, 2003):

"From a classical perspective the major revolutions in music have been
described as changes in the ways composers put notes, chords and instruments
together. Such a composition-centred view of musical history leaves out a lot
of other types of musical evolution. It doesn’t tell you very much about, for
example, rock and roll. I recall a conversation I had in the early 70s with a
classical composer, who said to me, ‘Of course, everything in rock music had
happened in classical music before 1832.’ ‘But it doesn’t account for Elvis,’ I
protested. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘that wasn’t a musical revolution, but a social
one.’

One of the many trajectories along which music develops is its social
dimension. New forms of music can be new in many different ways, and
one of them is what role they are intended to play in a listener’s life, or, to put it
another way, what use the listener will put them to. The difference between
sitting quietly in a chair and only coughing in the spaces between movements,
and screaming your head off in a stadium full of hysterical young girls is a real
difference. The difference between apprehending the compositional subtleties
of a Bach fugue and filling your apartment with Heavy Metal is a real difference.
These differences have to do with what social activity the music addresses, what
music is thought to be for.

Until recently music was inseparable from the space in which it was
performed - including the social space. One very strong movement in the
late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries was towards music as an immersive,
environmental experience. You see this in Mahler, Debussy, Satie, Varese and
then in Cage, La Monte Young and the Modernists. It’s a drift away from
narrative and towards landscape, from performed event to sonic space.

But it was recording which really liberated music from the moment of
performance and from the performers themselves. Records meant that music
could be carried and collected and listened to over and over. They allowed
people to take the music home, and to choose when and where and how they
would use it.

Recording and electronics also allowed composers to work with impossible
perspectives and relationships. Producers and musicians discovered that tiny
sounds could be made huge, and huge ones compacted. And, using echoes and
reverberations, those sounds could seem to be located in a virtual space which
was entirely imaginary. The act of making music becomes the art of creating."

And regarding "Telling someone that "Creep" is strumming a guitar I-III-IV-bIV is nothing..." uhm, tell that to Lana del Rey.

[Musicologo]

There's a lot of confused concepts in that post. But I can clarify "my point" with an ilustrative example inside the practices of this forum:

"I wanna learn about Song A [post video] because I wanna know how to do songs like that"

Theory 1: It's a song Verse-Verse-Chorus-Verse-Bridge-Chorus, progression I-vi-ii-V in the verse and I-IV-V7-I in the chorus. It uses 2 guitars, 1 bass and keys. You might want to fiddle around with the melody that in the chorus it goes higher that the verses and lands on some non-chord-tones in antecipation. Do that and you'll make that hit. This works because there is an innate brain functioning among harmonics and sound relatioships and expectations of tension and release and it will affect everybody.

Theory 2: Well, lets see the context in which Song A appeared. So it seems this is a song from the 80's in the context of music businesses. Music Supervisor Tom wanted to increase his profit, so he spotted that gorgeus looking good 17 year old chap Lou that could sing tune and decided to lauch him. He hired maestro/orquestrator Andrew, because he knew him already and trusted him. Andrew, had a band that played at a local venue in town. Therefore Lou went to Andrew's place and they spent there 3 hours. Lou hummed the tune and fiddled in the guitar. Andrew transcribed it and they arranged it so that it made a coherent structure. It ended up looking Verse-Verse-Chorus-Verse-Bridge-Chorus, progression I-vi-ii-V in the verse and I-IV-V7-I in the chorus. Then Andrew in the next couple days made an arrangement of the song for his own band in music notation and gave the parts to their musicians. The arrangement was for 2 guitars, 1 bass, keys and a sax. A few days later then went to the studio, Tom was there to watch the session. Musicians played their parts and several takes were made. At some point the keyboard player was playing all the right notes but still the thing sounded flat and dull, therefore Tom ringed to this chick he had banged a while back that he knew was currently married to a great soloist and told him to come. He came and improvised on that part and that worked beautifully. Lou on the other hand was a bit drunk and things went slowly, his takes had to be heavily comped.
The engineer then also added some warmth and juice with some analog gear. When everyone was happy with the track Tom decided to heavily promote it. He met with some executives from radios and offered some favours, hired a graphic designer to make a nice cover for the record, invested in a videoclip, hired some chicks he already banged that he thought would work well, and sent press-releases. The promotion alone involved a dozen people among crew and the investement was 10 times the fees paid to Andrew and the musicians. The song was a hit because people were massive listening to it 24/7 on the radio and there was a videoclip on MTV, featurign becautiful Lou and a bunch of chicks half naked, with a nice narrative creating positive assocations and lust via shared cultural conventions among the viewers. His song was also largely ignored in the places where it was not promoted, and in many countries that did not share those conventions. Tom made millions on that song and Lou as well. Andrew and his crew not so much. However Lou banged the wrong chick in the process, Tom got mad at him and eventually fired him. Lou was never able to have a hit again, despite humming countless other songs on his guitar, some of them more crafted than that one. The song worked because it was the result of a collective creation and complex negotiation involving several agents in the context of hierarchical structures and organizations inside music businesses and publishing industries and there was a massive investment made. It was not a folk song.

Which one is a theory that actually explains the song?
Analysing some parameters of the sounds of the musics - in isolation - is pretty much useless to understand reality and may even lead to wrong conclusions.
However, when you put the sound analysis on the context of the practices and agents involved, and provide much more detail, then you can start having explicative theories and having insight on how things work.
So for our "forumnite" that comes to this forum hoping to learn how to replicate that song perhaps theory 2 is much more adequate. One also has to wonder: WHY someone wants to replicate a song? To train a craft? I suspect many users are here because they want to learn to craft songs hoping someday they can embrace a career in the music business or publishing industries and earn money with them. If that's the case, then understanding theories like theory 2 is much more useful. My point is that (ethno/historical)musicologists are the ones that have been building methods and sicentific knowledge able to produce explanations and theories like theory 2, which are much more useful and encompassing.

[BertKoor]

The problem with theory 2 (and a lot of other stuff you post) is that it fails to grab my attention. TL;DR.
And it doesn't really help.

It was not a folk song.

Says who? Modern pop has a lot in common with ancient folk, but now it's on a global scale instead of confined to a single valley. Easy to digest and sing along & dance along. Just leave out the money-makers please, they do not really contribute to the product.

Some of the greatest hits were not crafted as such but happened to be happy accidents. More than 95% of what is crafted to be a hit, fails at actually becoming that.

You see bedroom producers emulating what they hear around them, and some of them are the next generation to shine in the spotlight, being an example for the next generation, producing music with a certain set vocabulary. How different is that from folk music of 150 years ago played at all the village weddings & festivals?

The novice still has to be taught how those chords are structured and what their names are, for easy communication. Later on he'll learn how to book the best gigs.

[Roman Empire]

Don´t get me wrong here, but isn´t this a huge academic take on completely ignoring the actual language of music, based on theory, where with theory I mean the definition of how chords interact etc.?
Just like you have grammar and vocabulary in your written language, you also have it in music and he or she who knows well how to navigate their language is a great poet/composer.
And yes, it´s interesting to imagine having been next to the writer when he wrote his book and understand why and how, but the book can stand out on its own and be read with great pleasure. What surrounded the book when it was written may add to a better understanding of the book, but will rarely be essential for achieving the same.
Billy Joel once said that a good popsong needs to be one that you can play with just a bass line and the melody on a piano; he understands the importance of emotions encoded directly into the music itself. Not into its sound, not into anybody dancing, breeding or dying to it.
In fact I think it´d be more interesting to use the results of that study to understand how different cultures have different perceptions of chord progressions; the theory and language of music.
For instance, I find some of Bachs solo-cello pieces uplifting, magical, as a glimpse of eternity and more while my wife will hear them as supersad. None of us were there when they were performed back in the days and that´s not what we´re moved by in the first place although of course you´ll always be a bit biased thinking about "the good old days" when you listen to classical music unless that´s all you listen to.

So yes, I agree that it´s interesting to see what people think that music was made for but the essence of ones personal experience of music is far more than how its performed and for which reason it was written.

[Gamma-UT]

So for our "forumnite" that comes to this forum hoping to learn how to replicate that song perhaps theory 2 is much more adequate

And here Musicologo's core problem surfaces: assumptions treated as "science". It's no wonder all your theorising looks like repackaged postmodernism. You take your own core beliefs and attempt to mould the world into a pattern that reflects them and only them.

I would argue that very few forumnites want to replicate an entire song. Rather, they want to replicate some or all of the devices and effects. The less successful forumnite may want to copy slavishly. The more successful comes to steal and incorporate the techniques into their own work - which is pretty much how any music – folk, pop or classical - works. Pop borrows from traditions that began in west Africa. And in various parts of Africa, musicians are acquiring techniques from what are now western traditions.

Part two of your answer has nothing to do with music. A far more entertaining treatment is in The KLF's The Manual. It's out of date and yet, really it isn't. At no point in it do Drummond and Cauty actually bother to write about a process for writing music other than: "If you are already a musician stop playing your instrument. Even better, sell the junk."

[Gamma-UT]

In fact I think it´d be more interesting to use the results of that study to understand how different cultures have different perceptions of chord progressions; the theory and language of music.

This is really hard to do experiments on but it's largely based on exposure. Christa Hansen did work on this in the 1980s - travelling to Bali to find isolated villages with a gamelan tradition (so that they had relatively little exposure to western music) and play different pitch sequences to get the participants to decide how well each note fits. With colleagues at Stanford, she flipped the experiment using gamelan music.

The upshot, as described by David Huron in Sweet Anticipation: "First, naive listeners are sensitive to the frequency of occurrence of various tones and rate the most frequent tones as best fitting. Second, listeners who are enculturated to an appropriate pitch schema experience pitch sequences as evoking some preexisting schema and judge the various tones on the basis of their frequency of occurrence in the totality of their past listening exposure rather than the frequency of occurrence in a given tone sequence."

Basically, we get used to music we hear a lot and process it through those acquired expectations.

You could probably do similar tests on yourself - with unfamiliar music from Asia or the Middle East. At the beginning, you hear motifs that are different to western motifs that seem important. After a lot of exposure, you start to hear the underlying patterns that indicate the emotional content the composer wanted to deliver.

[jancivil]

Don't get me wrong here, but isn't this a huge academic take on completely ignoring the actual language of music, based on theory, where with theory I mean the definition of how chords interact etc?

This is exactly my problem. It's an ongoing thrust for a little while now to knock music theory down to size. No, the true music theory should be theories of the mind and of anthropology. Ask about how to improve your handling of chord progressions and the answer is 'most materials derive from the semantic content of the lyrics', so one shouldn't even start with chord progressions which will limit the expression. And here's more bullshit. Someone asks what to do to understand a song and Theory 1, a formal deconstruction, is trashed in favor of Theory 2, talking about behaviors during the sessions.

It appears to deliberately set aside huge swaths of what has happened, in favor of some poorly-defined suppositions which are nonetheless so beautiful they will always be true.

Me, I never had these experiences the ethnographer is at pains to find and wax 'deep' about. I started with records, by the time I was a competent musician I had a kind of osmosis from things which were not a part of family time around the house, never existed to have some non-professional function or function outside being some kind of entertainment if not 'art' ,and were artifacts for study which I could refer back to again and again. So in order to de-reify music qua music this very narrow band of activity which is basically just easier to present on an internet forum as though it's something are vaulted up to a superior status, as though social function makes it 'authentic'. It's a completely fraudulent idealism and it appears to be happening itself in isolation from that sort of activity. From the same position as I am writing, in a chair looking at the internet.


edit for syntax

[jancivil]

You know, it doesn't help us understand the Tristan Chord to know about Wagner's problem with Jews. It's a minor iv in first inversion (Dm/F bass, key of A minor) but the sixth is augmented. F - D to F - D#. And the A has an appoggiatura G# before the A happens. And we have a flat five, spelled as #4, because here's the French Sixth harmony, now sounding as F B D# G#. Sounds like a half-diminished seventh but it's a sort of dominant to the dominant: A moves to an A# over E7 and it continues up to B, a harmonic tone of the V7. Finally it goes to i. That's how that works. What was going on in Wagner's life that day? What in the day-to-day moved him to come up with that?

Who knows. (Maybe he was thinking technically, regarding musical ideas, even.) Why would we want to reduce this to that kind of thing? Because you have to actually know something about music to follow this. You can speculate about human motives, which is a fine thing if you want to write a play or something, but this does not help us get the music.

[Musicologo]

Your explanation of the Tristan Chord might actually be accurate regarding Wagner because he was a composer creating works on symbolic notation on paper and he indeed used concepts like the ones you are employing. That explanation is a post-facto attempt at explaining the peculiar spelling of those notes in the text Wagner produced, in a way that still would make sense according to what we know about Wagner knowledge and skills of the craft, involving the rules of voice leading and functional harmony. It's an attempt at answerign the question: why did Wagner spell it this way? That explanation therefore only works in the texts produced in very similar contexts. And it is an explanation regarding production.

However if the chord F B D# G# suddenly appears on a print of an EDM song made by a 17 old kid that never had solfege and composes by playing with the mouse in a piano roll on a DAW that explanation is fraudulent. You'd find out that D# and G# were spelled that way because that's how MIDI works on a piano roll and he couldn't be bothered to tell the difference between Eb/D# or Ab/G# and it just sounded good to him when he played it back. It might just happened by limitations of the technology used in the production in that case. That's why we also have Cm spelled as C-D#-G so many times and etc...

That explanation also doesn't answer any particular question about the reception of the sounds of the musics by listeners in a void. How does the Tristan Chord works for whom, when and where is relevant to know.

[Musicologo]

I realized there is also another subtle problem in your explanation of the Tristan Chord.
We need to separate the production from the reception. Are we studying the production of music [concept, behaviour, sounds - object: man, texts, sheet music, recordings; science: musicology] or the reception of sounds of the musics? [subjective; object: vibrations, brains ; science: physics, psychology, neurology]. You need different disciplines with different theories depending on your question regarding the Tristan Chord. How and why was it produced, or how and why does it works for certain listeners?

[Functional]

Never seen so much boring talk about such an intriguing topic.

I haven't studied musicology but had I ever chosen an academic path in music, I'd certainly rather study musicology than music theory. Regardless, you're really missing the mark here regarding the people you're talking with. If you're talking about people who are concerned about music theory (and I remind you, as you've been reminded already couple of times: you're in _music theory_ board, people here _are interested about music theory mostly_), you're gonna have a bad time trying to frame things so that theory of music is inapplicable framework and all / most that matters is the sociocultural context.

You seem to acknowledge that music theory has applications to a degree but you're still in denial about it and instead it seems like the whole purpose of all of this was actually about you ranting how, supposedly, classical music theory is oppressive because it's in a hegemonic status when it comes to how we analyze music. And sure, you're partially right: even though you can analyze pop music from classical music theory perspective, you'll still be missing out on a lot of things (that do not usually have anything to do with ethnomusicology).

But see, there's a problem that you're missing: musicology is barely if at all useful for actually anything else but analysis, whereas classical music theory is pretty useful for more than just analysis. Now you could argue that there are other things like mixing and sound design which can be useful to analyze as well and yet are neglected. I'd say that's true, but the "theory" of those things tends to be more like a bricolage of just different principles with very little unified theory and crazy amounts of ambiguity. Traditional music theory institutions are slowly also adopting them (although it's not easy due to cult of sheet music, but it's also understandable given that before recordings even existed, sheet paper was all there was, hence it's still valued as a fundamental language to music theory).

So while yes, classical music theory might be dominant way to analyze things that it cannot really describe entirely, it's still pretty much the only unified theory that actually manages to describe things in ways that are useful. For example, your notion of pop music being a lot about the production process... sure, I'll agree with that given that I've spent years now analyzing and understanding and applying different production methods. But what sort of theory you'd come up with that manages to connect production methods commonly found in glitch music AND production methods commonly found in dubstep? They are so different from each other it's really comical at this point.

The two examples are great in particular because classical music theory has so little to say about them as well. The non-americanized dubstep (i.e. not brostep) is at best minimal to the point where they just have a bassline and really intricate syncopated drum patterns. So like, you could say something like "well it's polyrythmic where you have basic half-time kick & snare pattern in 4/4 but in addition another kick pattern in 3/4" and you could say "Well the bassline has G, E and F in it..." and maybe say something about the form as well and of course about the tempo. This still isn't really super useful information if you want to make dubstep.

Yet, it's far more useful than what musicology has to say about dubstep... you can talk about certain kind of sounds such as growls, laid back or perhaps aggressive feeling of it all, the meaning of samples that might be from interviews, the genesis of dubstep. Great, if we just consider analysis, we already have far better (although still meager) picture of dubstep! But if I now sit down in front of a DAW and decide "let's make dubstep", guess what? Yup, none of this actually helps me in making dubstep. Whereas with classical music theory at least I could think about using elementary polyrhythm to differentiate myself from the average 4/4 half-time pattern that has been used for so long. Or I could use the notion of syncopation to go towards the same goal somewhat.

So yes, there's actually reasons why classical music theory is so dominant. And I'm saying this as your average bedroom producer, I don't understand how someone who studies / has studied actually musicology wouldn't be aware about all of this.

I also think you aren't helping your goals at all here. If you want to validate musicology in others eyes, then present it in a way that actually is useful. I've found that talking about music in musicological terms with actual composers who I work with helps us to create a language which can relay other useful information that they otherwise can't necessarily through just the score and that helps me as a producer to make things so that they align (hopefully) better for what has been envisioned.

I'd much rather have them thinking in future due to positive experiences that alternative ways to think about music can be very useful to allow something to happen (at least when exchanging information with others) and perhaps think about ways that they could facilitate these alternative ways of thinking into more traditional framework in an useful manner. What you're doing here is just making a fool of yourself and if anyone thought you'd represent a wider group of people within your field, your whole field will be associated with that.

The main point, so you wont forget it, is that the "alternative modes of thinking" are simply either not unified theories or almost useless for creation. Mixing, sound design and production methods overall are not an unified category to be considered as a theoretical framework that is useful for analysis, because the more genres or aesthetics (or what have you) you start accommodating, the less universality there will actually be and your whole theory will just be trivial & bland or it's gonna be an endless tree full of contextual branches that will be pretty pointless anyway. Not to mention that you can't really ever answer a question like "In what cases could I use the 80's gated verb snare thing?" in a non-trivial way like "When you're seeking for the 80's aesthetic or making synthpop!" ...you can't just really have an academic degree where all of this info will be packed in a non-biased way

Meanwhile bedroom producers who actually use this sort of information are very well aware that it's a thing that belongs to a different realm. We literally have Discord channels that are bound to specific genres where we talk about the production methods we use. YouTube is full of videos for us and we use google all the time for that. It might be a shame that composer never thinks about music in this way but if they don't even deal with synthesizers and they won't produce music, it would be a huge waste of time for them anyway. If you want to promote this sort of thinking, then work with them instead of complaining about them. And the only reason insofar why musicology could be practical is because it helps you to understand production tricks (but production IS separate from musicology).

[Functional]

Also some more experience-based insights about Theory 2 from a person to whom these things DO matter.

Very often they just don't... matter. The way sessions shape up to be is just a natural equilibrium that comes when you work with people. Once you talk in the same language and you are capable to exchange ideas to decent degree and understand each other and each others artistic goals and are on the same page of it all, then the interaction will be shaped by a ton of factors: how much time do you both have? how often can you both meet up? how? (etc etc)

It's the reality that pushes us to the equilibrium. And sometimes, even in comical ways, you'll just realize it doesn't work. Like there used to be this person I worked with. She was amazing, but our equilibrium was such that 90% of the time during our sessions we just talked about anything really. It was great for comradery, not so great for creating music. Had to split because of it and hope that won't occur again in future.

Now, I'm working with someone who is rather strict on schedules so we don't have weekly sessions, but the arrangement is such that when she feels like she got her part down, we arrange a recording session where we focus to get it all down and maybe talk a little too.

And personally speaking, neither does the musicology of lot of sound design matter either. I love a particular type of reese bass, okay? But... knowing all the surrounding history and social context of reese basses doesn't matter to me like, at all. It's probably going to be forever a part of my production as the only kind of bass I prefer simply because I love how reeses sound and how flexible they are. Same with 2-step rhythms and half-step rhythms. I don't use them because of some social context out there, I use them because I'm actually terrible in the four-to-the-floor rhythm (not the signature; all I do is in 4/4, maybe some day some 3/4 too), whereas in half-step and 2-step you can make things easier interesting (imo) through the use of syncopation. Another thing lately to standardize for me is the use of (sometimes glitchy) offline processing methods creatively along with cork & screw methods. In both cases I have _zero_ clue about their social context. Funniest thing here is that jancivil, the person who supposedly is too focused on music theory, was the first person to teach me about the existence of offline processing that started it (although I use it in ways that she didn't talk about iirc). I use these methods when I'm thinking about how to make chords or melodies more interesting while being in a lazy mood to consider things from music theory perspective and just want computer to spice things up for me while I play around with it. Works out pretty well. Here's an example of all previous things in same setting: http://picosong.com/wYknu/

It's the same story in lot of things that become standard for me, they're standard for reasons that refer to my (albeit subjective) reality. But like, musicology hasn't informed me at all on any of these. They're just things you learn to do.

[jancivil]

There are a number of things in the classical music, ie., Common Practice Period of western art music which were originally folk dances in some form or other. And by the time they appear in certain works, the dance which is done is abstracted, refined or reduced. And it's not unusual to see that much of the information about the original was lost.

The one thing on which this origin has bearing 'today' is the rhythm. And what you need to know about that is not terrifically complicated, at least in order to grasp its realization in let's say the Bourrèe in the music of JS Bach. And so when one experiences say Bourrèe in the suite known as 3rd Violin Partita one does not expect people to get up and bourrèe in the aisles.

I wrote an actual paper on the form of this before I performed it (aka Lute Suite in E). However I don't know the moves to any of the forms, it didn't seem like it would add a lot.
I wrote a small paper on Duendè in Flamenco music before I left for the bigger school. I'm not saying there's nothing to your roots of a music and so forth, but the use value for a lot of that is pretty limited if not nonexistent.

And if the goal is to come across as a musicologist it looks like some real work lies ahead. Here it appears the assessment of your peers was 'they're a bunch of schmucks, I can get away with this easy.'.

[jancivil]

The difference between apprehending the compositional subtleties
of a Bach fugue and filling your apartment with Heavy Metal is a real difference.
These differences have to do with what social activity the music addresses, what
music is thought to be for.

Not too unusual to see people engaged in the latter believing they're doing the former, these days.
"what music is for" - difference to me being, there is music qua music and there is music which is all social function, or a lifestyle jacket. So there are people who only follow the one thing which is a jacket, which is gang colors representing your gang's brand, ie., how you want to be perceived socially. And if their 'tastes' change it's married to that.

I don't get what a real understanding of a Bach fugue does for that, albeit it's not hard to feature there are people who are classical music aficionados as a style, with those elbow patches on teh suede jackets to go with...

[jancivil]

"From a classical perspective the major revolutions in music have been
described as changes in the ways composers put notes, chords and instruments
together. Such a composition-centred view of musical history leaves out a lot
of other types of musical evolution. It doesn’t tell you very much about, for
example, rock and roll. I recall a conversation I had in the early 70s with a
classical composer, who said to me, ‘Of course, everything in rock music had
happened in classical music before 1832.’ ‘But it doesn’t account for Elvis,’ I
protested. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘that wasn’t a musical revolution, but a social
one.’

What will one do in 400 years which will help the most to recreate the excitement of Elvis.
Is Elvis and the attendant social revolution a musical evolution? I think not actually.
I'm reminded of encountering people somewhat unlike me in music school such as a freshman, 18 years old who seemed to have just discovered the fact that V can go to IV in rock music. He was pretty excited about it. So while I think disregarding rock like that is lame (and it sounds like a strawman), it IS true that we're dealing in very limited materials. Actually this is why I started typing. My mind is going. But to this 'classical-oriented' individual, the excitement of rock was that, the chords and the freedom, one supposes, from the too-tight shoes in everything up to that.

People are already guilty, I'm sure, of treating 'rock and roll' as compositional devices, reductive to materials and abstracting them. I think rock and roll is probably dead and not just something lying over there and smelling funny.
So... this 'social revolution' happened around the time of my birth. Out of the deep south-cum Memphis. What does it mean? Why should I care? A white man has a bigger hit with the Jewish guys-written Hound Dog than Big Mama Thornton, all musical considerations to the contrary.

I'd much rather read that than most of this thread but again my problem with thinking music is more than musical content arises. It's a 12-bar blues progression. That's what I can use.
To get into the weeds on why the earlier record is so much better is probably musicological, probably interesting and probably something which will get us into trouble.

It did turn 'race records' into something a bit more commercial by not being a race record but a record by a white redneck.

Hopefully over time that will all be seen as kind of bizarre.
Some ramble, what.