ONE MUSIC, MANY VOICES

When we strip away genre labels and analyze music by its core elements, an amazing truth emerges: all music is interconnected. The barriers between “classical” and “folk” and “pop” start to crumble when we see the influence chains that link them. History is not isolated progressions of distinct genres, but rather a big jam session of ideas, with each culture and era improvising on the last. To illustrate this, consider a few astounding connections.

In 1889, French composer Claude Debussy wandered into a pavilion at the Paris Expo and heard Javanese gamelan music for the first time. The layered bronze percussion, the exotic scales – it blew his mind. Debussy found tremendous inspiration in gamelan music – not just its exotic surface, but its structure, texture, and modality. He began using pentatonic and whole-tone scales and bell-like textures in his compositions directly because of that encounter. Fast forward: Debussy’s new harmonic language would influence early jazz (musicians like Bix Beiderbecke and Duke Ellington admired Debussy’s chords), and even the great Charlie “Bird” Parker – yes, the bebop saxophonist – practiced Debussy and Stravinsky pieces to expand his own vocabulary. In 1951, Bird famously quoted Stravinsky’s Firebird melody in a solo at Birdland, causing Stravinsky (in attendance) to literally spill his drink in delight. Think about that: Indonesian villagers playing gongs influenced Debussy; Debussy influenced Stravinsky; Stravinsky influenced Charlie Parker; and Charlie Parker went on to influence countless American musicians. That’s a direct cross-continental lineage spanning gamelan to jazz. Superficially, they sound nothing alike – but through the lens of melody, harmony, and texture, we see the chain. Present Music analysis makes these connections clear, treating music as one big family tree instead of isolated islands.

Johann Sebastian Bach, the Baroque master of fugues, never heard a hip-hop beat in his life – yet his influence is everywhere. The circle of fifths progressions and baseline harmonies Bach codified are the basis of innumerable pop songs. The four-chord progression (I–V–vi–IV) that powers ballads by Elton John or Adele has its roots in classical voice-leading. Producers and songwriters often borrow classical tricks intuitively; for example, The Beatles used a Baroque descending bass line in songs like “Michelle,” mimicking Bach’s approach to harmony. Conversely, Bach’s own music has been remixed and reborn in modern textures – Wendy Carlos’s Switched- On Bach put his melodies on a Moog synth in 1968, creating a trippy electronic texture around those pristine sequences. In the 2000s, hip-hop producers like Kanye West have sampled soul and classical alike, effectively acting as modern-day Bachs by combining voices from different eras. Kanye might layer a string sample (evoking classical melody), a gospel choir harmony, and a hard drum rhythm all together. In one track, he sampled a 1970s Hungarian rock song and a 2000s gospel choir, blending textures from different eras with contrasting emotional atmospheres — gritty analog psychedelia meeting triumphant, spiritual uplift.

This approach has led critics to note that Bon Iver’s 22, A Million — though entirely his own work — is deeply influenced by Kanye West, soaked in autotune, fractured sampling, and daring sonic design that echoes Yeezus and 808s & Heartbreak. Such genre-defying transformations reveal how being present to all elements can create something fresh. In other words, a Present Musician like Kanye is a conduit through which the past’s melodies and rhythms flow into the present’s sound. He builds new works by quoting and transforming past works, not unlike how Beethoven took folk tunes or how Bach wove Lutheran hymns into complex fugues. Sampling is a key practice of Present Music – it explicitly shows the connections. The song “Blood on the Leaves” by Kanye layers a centuries-old melody (via Nina Simone’s rendition of “Strange Fruit”) over a TNGHT trap beat. It’s like two epochs of music having a conversation.

Virtually all popular music today rests on rhythmic foundations that trace back to West African drumming traditions. Consider the ubiquitous 3-2 clave rhythm in Latin music (think Tito Puente) – it’s directly descended from African bell patterns. Those patterns traveled with enslaved Africans to the New World, giving birth to Afro-Cuban music (son, rumba), which in turn fed into jazz and rock. The standard backbeat in rock (emphasis on 2 and 4) has roots in African-American work songs and blues clapping patterns. Even the modern reggaeton beat (boom-chboom- chick), as mentioned, comes from the meeting of Jamaican dancehall with those Afro-Latin rhythms – literally the beat can be traced to “descendants of West Indian workers…who emigrated from Jamaica to help build the Panama Canal” and started singing reggae in Spanish. So when you hear Bad Bunny on the radio and feel that irresistible urge to move, you are responding to a rhythmic DNA that might be hundreds of years old.