Eclectic Approach

One way to understand what universal level of music is about, is to imagine a musical scene that sublimes all the best from all the musical styles. Western classical music tradition is with a reason almost equated with musical art; but for example, universal idea of polyphony can be even more seen in Javanese national music than in most advanced baroque polyphonic writing.

… Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint which make Palestrina seem like child’s play. Claude Debussy

Or how about national African polyrhytmic music? Or Indian usage of quarter-tones? This idea to work on the level of everything that music can be was emphasized by fusion movement that was especially strong during 1990s. It was in the same time seen as a movement in a broader, social sense, the idea of bringing different nations together, through mixing all the world's music – like “Pangaea” pra-continent, that once existed, contained all of the today divided continents. The idea was to bring together what is separate now and was one before. But this approach soon turned into an abuse, because fusion was seen as diversity coming together - where composing is about dealing with what is at the core of every music, subliming universal musical qualities from different cultures.

Despite classical music is the most sophisticated and advanced of the traditional musical streams, it can be argued that it is not classical, but the most popular early European music – Renaissance music in particular – that albeit quite primitive, gives the most firm guide and idea of purely musical logic and substance. For as the music progressed down the classical path, with an increase in artifice, depth and evolvedness, it also brought bad things that need to be rejected. These wrong paths are absent in these charming Renaissance music planetary hits. A renaissance tune had the direct charm and musicality to it, without a trace of some artificial sophistication, yet not completely basic as XX century pop mostly was; it had that immediate kind of logic that is the true science of music and true transcendent base of music. Much later, when electronic instruments came, and when musicians started searching for a more universal musical language, the best among them in many ways returned not to classical, but back to medieval and renaissance music; it was like return back to where classical music had also started, but taking a bit different path from there. So they applied electronic instruments and textures to this early music and its rich modal harmonic language, superior to largely diatonic (key-driven) language of most classical music. On that way we could rediscover the immense depth and complexity of medieval harmony and powerful directness of a renaissance melody through the incipient electronic orchestrations of Jean Michel Jarre. The way on which these often simple tunes were catching the ear was not on the way popular music was doing the same. When one music forum member said that JM Jarre is a pop musician, another one answered “his tunes are more catchy than poppy”. And the kind of logic this music had was again not that kind of often dry development demonstrated in academic pieces. It was more immediate.