What pop music owes to the classical masters http://gu.com/p/3daph/stw
I think the modern pop song was created by Schubert.
Schubert was a remarkable talent. Melodies poured out of him. He
wrote 600 songs, and, like today's songwriters, his intention was to
write music that would be instantly enjoyable. There's not a moment
where he is trying to catch you out or where you have to listen 10 times
before you get your head around a song. He wants you to get it first
time; there's verse-chorus, voice and piano underneath, and he wants you
to remember the chorus.
Some of these simple rules of songwriting just continue to be the
simple rules of songwriting, and there's nothing much about Adele or
Simon & Garfunkel or Leonard Cohen's songs that would have seemed
alien to the Viennese composer in terms of the chords, or the shape, the
way the verse leads into the chorus, or the piano accompaniment. In
fact, the thing that would strike Schubert as most odd about an Adele
song is the fact that a woman wrote it rather than being its object.
Schubert came to many of the same conclusions as modern songwriters –
that writing random song after song is no use, that creating 20 songs
and a journey is a much more satisfying form. And so that's what he did
with his song cycles. They are longer pieces where people go on a
journey and each song forms the next bit of the story.
