It's really no wonder that Beethoven and Mozart are considered the best composers, past or present, in the world. They studied for decades under the very best composers in all of Europe before staggering the world with the creativity, complexity, and profundity of their music. THAT is what one requires to make the best music in the world, years and years of education in the fundamentals of music. This is how you learn to master the truly breathtaking and creative techniques of music in order to create music with depth and complexity.
Modern pop and rock music is severely limited because musicians of today receive such precious little formal training that they tend to use primitive structures (like the 32-bar or AABA form), musical cliches, or borrowed elements from other styles of music that are also cliched, borrowed, or primitive. When modern composers combine these elements, it is usually in simplistic ways and within conventional boundaries. There are many ways in which this is true, and they all have to do with music theory. I'll list a few:
- The vast majority of pop and rock music is in 4/4 time. Thus, other time signatures, the common 3/4 and others such as 12/8, 5/4, 7/8, 6/8, 7/8, 7/16 etc. are not part of the vocabulary.
- A great deal of rock and pop uses a fairly limited number of scales and modes. Pentatonic scales, often used, are composed of only five notes in contrast to standard musical scales that contain eight notes. This necessarily limits the complexity of the music.
- Dynamics are avoided - the music is at one level of loudness, and
dynamic changes such as pianissimo, forte, crescendo, diminuendo, are
not part of the vocabulary of pop and rock.
- Polyphony is largely absent and the vast majority of the music is
driven by chord changes that are fairly simple in nature. The
complexity of polyphonic, or contrapuntal, music is mastered by very
few music students today, and it is certainly not even attempted by
most rock musicians, whether they are performers or composers.
Polyphony, or counterpoint, is not hard to understand, though it's tremendously hard to create. To this day, sophisticated counterpoint is seen by composers as the "height of a composer's art". Counterpoint is essentially the overlapping of separate melodies. By design, they occasionally harmonize or complement each other to create a much deeper, more complex melody or harmonization. Bach was a master of counterpoint, but it took him until the final years of his life to create The Art of Fugue, which, at the time, made him the undisputed master of counterpoint. Not until the very end of Mozart's life did he write the piece of music that bested Bach in terms of counterpoint, and that, to this day, remains unmatched in the musical world.
Among the very few modern rock and pop artists that I have seen make any attempt at incorporating elements of classical music is the Mexican rock band, Cafe Tacuba. Their 1999 album Reves is strictly instrumental music. If you listen to Tacvba's Reves, you will notice that the songs are mostly homophonic - there is one melody that is elaborated throughout, with the rest of the sounds acting as accompaniment. In parts of La Dos (Track 2), you hear a bit of polyphony, but it is limited to two melodies - simple ones at that. Most of the other songs on Reves aren't worth mentioning in terms of polyphony; they are simplistic to the point of being akin to archaic folk music, which I believe is what Tacvba was trying to do with those songs.
But now we come to 5.1 (Track 8). It purports to be a piece in the strictly classical sense. The instruments used are strictly woodwinds - oboes and flutes - and it exemplifies many of the fundamental traits of classical music - variable rhythm and tempo, progression of melody, little repetition. Compared to modern music, it shows a great deal of complexity. However, compared to classical music it is unbelievably simplistic. Though there is progression of melody, the melody develops very little. Also, apart from being the shortest piece on the album (classical pieces tend to be decidedly long in order to fully elaborate musical ideas), it uses no polyphony nor even accompaniment. Much less than using polyphony or even homophony, 5.1 uses monophony, melody without accompaniment. I appreciate the effort, though. It is one of my favorite pieces on Reves. It hints at the wonderful music that so many of us have left behind for the much cooler sounding pop and rock of today.
I like M.C. a lot, though less than 5.1. It shares with 5.1 some of the elementary aspects of classical music that set classical apart from modern music - halts in music, diminuation, attenuation, non-repetitiveness or through-composition. Again, it pales in comparison to the complexities of even early Baroque compositions, but it attempts a noble, very worthwhile, and much appreciated deed: reviving classical music for the masses.
Sources:
Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?
http://music.duke.edu/grads/courses.php
http://www.ibiblio.org/johncovach/gentlegiant.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_fugue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_structure_%28popular_music%29