so a long time ago there were these people. one day they discovered sound, and that developed into a specific tone and pitch. this then developed into the musical line and, eventually, the phrase. then after a while some different people discovered harmony. this is the accentuation of a pitch through context, the chord. the development of classical music was the perfection of tonality, the perfection of the standard use of chords. these chords then developed their own personalities during the romantic era, allowing composers to express with more emotion and texture than with a melody alone. the move into atonality was the liberation of these chords, the freedom of pitch from its harmonically pleasing restraints. atonality is music that is expressive without being aesthetically pleasing to the human audience through tonality. it is, however, pleasing in other ways, mainly intellectually and as 'art for art's sake.' these both require knowledge and study of the subject. the problem with this is that when art isolates itself from its audience, it begins to lose its worth to that audience, and they will move on.
we are experiencing the move of the audience's interest from one major thing to another, in this case from classical to beat music.
this new taste is called 'beat music' due to its heavy reliance on a steady beat, and the new feelings that arouses in the human audience. the beat, developed in africa, provides a new material - the need to move, to dance, to contact the audience in as physical a way as possible. classical does have a beat in dance forms, but they are not as important as the expressive quality of the music.
the new musical environment provided by the beat is completely different from classical, and beginning to be explored.
