The denouement?

[pbrower2a]

(09-27-2022, 12:45 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(09-26-2022, 01:30 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: The majority of GI music was more dry, but on the plus side 
- more suitable for adult audience, not radio stations full of people who think the ideal is to sound 16 years old
- less quite as self-absorbed. it was less about the singer personally and more about the music itself. 
- similarly, the point itself seemed less like "let's make the best music" and more "let's focus on our craft and produce beautiful singing.

"let's make the best music" sounds best to me.

I concur. It is possible to create great music with glorious counterpoint and structure, and perhaps the display of wondrous virtuosity as an extended entertainment. Even so, music can be reduced to melodic lines and rhythm. Melodies can be complex; a composer is excused for the banality of a tune if able to put it into some glorious purpose. It's hard to imagine anyone singing the initial melody of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, but we can excuse such due to the greatness of the completed work. 

It is telling that Irving Berlin practically stole his tune for "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" from Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #5, turning the single notes into one, shortening the tune, and slowing the melody enough for Judy Garland. One genius meets another.

I mentioned the string quartets of Bartok and Shostakovich. Both composers, neither of which went full-bore atonal, adopted or imitated folk song for melodic coherence. It worked well. 

For musical coherence, folk music (song or dance) is the appropriate ideal for melodic virtue. Other genius, as in counterpoint, harmonization, extension, variation, addition of a rhythmic line (no -- not a disco beat, something far more suitable to derision than the much-maligned Alberti bass of an earlier time), and orchestration can make a work to satisfy musical sophisticates.