Daniel Shugrue

“Twentieth-century music has brought new complexity into rhythms, studio production, instrumentation, and a variety of other features that were uniform, less varied, or nonexistent in previous music. Modern compositions, even in narrow musicological terms, do not necessarily provide less depth than their predecessors. The songs of Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, or the Beatles are arguably no less compositionally complex (and perhaps more complex) than the lieder of Schubert. Schubert wrote about 700 songs, most of which no one ever listens to or analyzes. Many of these songs are technically and compositionally undistinguished, and tend to be formulaic in their melodic treatment. Are "Bill," "Take the A Train," "Crepuscule with Nellie," and "A Day in the Life" really inferior or lesser products?”
― Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture