[lucasgw]

Listen to techno, house and tribal, and you hear Koyaanisqatsi, 18 Musicians, and the work of Glass, Reich, and Riley.

Listen to Glass, Reich, and Riley - and you hear the deconstruction of symphonic structure.

Listen to Beethoven's symphonies and you hear the struggle of form from Mozart's classical era construction to what would become Beethoven's pure romanticism.

Listen to the interplay of an Alberti Bass and melody in Mozart's Piano Sonatas, and you hear the beauty in the evolution of counterpoint as written by Bach, Scarlatti, and their band of powdered wigs.

Listen to Bach and Scarlatti, and you hear the echoes of Gregorian Chant and the Diabolus in Musica (and why Black Sabbath sounds like Black Sabbath.)

Those who forget the past are doomed to be Miley Cyrus.

[baddox]

There's even plenty of music theory to learn with Miley Cyrus, particularly if you want to know about just intonation and harmonic theory. Even the simplest and most ubiquitous pop chord progressions with just I IV and V require a fair amount of harmonic theory to reason about.

[tomsthumb]

A number of more talented musicians than myself have also remarked that there is actually a lot of weird stuff going in top 40 music. It's so bland and repetitive that they have to do something different for it to be memorable; it's just not the focus of the song.

[baddox]

That's pretty much the definition of pop music, or at least good pop music.

[TheOtherHobbes]

>Listen to techno, house and tribal, and you hear Koyaanisqatsi, 18 Musicians, and the work of Glass, Reich, and Riley.

No, you hear Koyaanisqatsi, etc.

And this is exactly why you should never try to understand a popular genre by crossreferencing its stylings against some other style or genre.

Because other people hear other things - many, many other things - which perhaps you're not aware of.

[lucasgw]

I get your point, and of course everybody hears something different. That's music!

But this particular combination is like saying, "Listen to Billy Joel and you hear piano." ;) House and techno really are direct lineage from the minimalists in many ways. This is not a blind cross-reference. Any artist learns and borrows from what has come before. Some borrow more heavily than others. (As an aside, check out the 2006 album "Reich Remixed" for some really cool interpretations... )

[Energy1]

Suppose I am listening to Les Claypool's bass work. What olden stuff am I hearing?

[lucasgw]

Listen to Les, and hear the technique and round sound of Jaco Pastorius. (or at least I do.)

Listen to Portrait of Tracy (or any great harmonic jazz) and you hear the same open chord structures of Impressionist works like Debussy's Preludes or Ravel's Valse Nobles.

Listen to the impressionists and you go many places...

Ravel and Debussy's piano music is barely one step removed from jazz. Makes sense, because the early jazz greats lived and played around the same time. There's a famous picture of Ravel at a birthday party when he was in his 50s, with George Gershwin standing beside him. The early 1900s was an amazing time in music... classical was mixing with early jazz was mixing with vaudeville was mixing with the first stirrings of delta blues was mixing with gospel was mixing with african folks songs...

(I can do this all night... ;)

[tomsthumb]

Progressions are old as dirt. Pretty much all solos are melodic arrangements which fit over an underlying chord progression. Bassicaly (ahahhahahaha), if you broke it down enough, you would be able to "strum" a Les Claypool bass solo.