As with most who are trying to deconstruct music itself, right down to tone and temperament systems, you admit that you have no clue what the old ways sounded like, yet you’re sure they rocked!!!1 Your only criterion for good music (and art in general, I’m sure) is that it represents the human experience in some vague way. Through this lens, the music of Nefertiti or Charlemagne’s time is on perfectly equal footing with Camptown Races (the single most corn-pone, backwoods example of Western music you could possibly have offered, by the way. If you picked Rhapsody in Blue would we even be having this conversation? I get it, you have to caricaturize Western music to make your point, but you’re insufferably ham-fisted about it).

If twelve tone dies in the next 25 years it will be from the straitjacketing it’s received in contemporary pop harmony, which has consistently gotten more dumbed down with each decade. It will serve no purpose once the average chart topper is a club banger that uses 2, maybe 3 notes for the entire song. At that point, of course your drone composers are gonna sound glorious. So what?

I should mention that I thought the Ellen Fullman piece was gorgeous. I’m just going to be sad if that’s what usurps pop music, and your article seems to be saying not only that it could, but that it has a moral obligation to do so. I say bollocks.