Given a millennium's worth of growth and development, even the worst musicologist should be able to trace, most acutely, the growth and maturation of his subject. (If for some perspectivist cataract he cannot, then perhaps he's better fitted for the suit 'n tie ensemble of arts administration, rather than the pens, pads and right clicks of academia).
Of course music changes, dude. Furthermore, those very changes are the manifestation of our ascent towards a higher plane of cognition.
Existing in a perpetual state of flux the likes of which only Heraclitus could fathom, only David Bowie could articulate, music is, in fact, "ch-ch-ch-ch-chaaaange."
From organum and equal temperament, to secondary dominants and bitonality, to hexachordal combinatoriality and seven-limit microtonality on through to real-time electro-acoustic synthesis, music--or at least Western art music, which is really the one true litmus test for this discourse--has continually morphed into an ever more complex matrix of sounds.
Consequently, music today--as an artistic totality--is operating on a much more sophisticated cognitive level than it was 100, 25 or even five years ago. (Well, Western art music, anyway.)
Concurrently, modern human intelligence--as a cerebral totality--is functioning at a much greater perceptual aptitude than it ever has, as well.
Whereas each evolutionary development in music may not necessarily dictate a reciprocal response from the cognate mind (actually, it's quite the opposite), as Wayne Bowman reminds us: "Whatever else it may be, music is a product of human minds."
Indeed, it was the early Christian mind that first harmonized the monophonic liturgy in perfect parallel intervals. And it took a brain mired in the Enlightenment to devise a tuning theory based upon the twelfth root of two.
Moreover, it was a post-World War II mind that invoked the supremacy of the omnipresent set form. And, ultimately, only a brain firmly ensconced in our own age of technological anxiety could construct the musical cyborgs of our own epoch.
Thus, music matures as fast as the mind, and to some extent the Zeitgeist, will allow.
Together, the two act as a sort of pituitary legislature, regulating the escalation and expansion of artistic creation. What cannot first be divined by the mind, itself, indeed cannot be expressed in corollary functions of it: music, poesie, theater, the plastic arts.
Furthermore, even as these ancillary functions, themselves, coalesce into actual humanistic endeavors--music, poesie, theater, the plastic arts--they are still inextricably bound by the intellectual facility of the mind from whence they emerged.
In short, the history of music is the history of human thought. And we, as humans, are always changing our minds.
Modern music's greatest teachers of composition--Boulanger, Hindemith, Hanson, Martin Bresnick--often cautioned their more demagogic students that further innovation was no longer possible. After all, what could they do that Bach had not initiated, Mozart not perfected and John Cage's New School not obliterated.
Well, for the most part, Nadia, Paul, Howard and Martin Bresnick were right; for at the present time at least, it seems that man--as both artist and thinker--has reached the upper extrema of invention.
As a civilization, it appears that we've journeyed to the brink of both aesthetic and intellectual discovery...as we now know them to exist.
So, for all would-be iconoclasts, the last remaining musical revolution would be to break the triple covalent bonds of that indomitable natural phenomenon--the harmonic series--and render them asunder.
Only then, having conquered God, Himself, the steadfast flux that is music shall halt altogether, and human knowledge shall become what is has so desperately wanted to be since crawling out of the primordial sludge: infinite.
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