Yes. We can get a lot of mileage by talking about the form and texture.
E.g., at the end of Haydn's so-called "Lark" quartet (Op. 64 No. 5) he's got a fast-paced Rondo in D major that features a virtuosic 1st violin part with continuous fast figuration. The other voices do a light accompaniment of that fast-moving line.
It moves along about as you'd expect-- you get the main rondo theme. It gets repeated. Then a contrasting theme appears in the dominant, with a little bridge back to the original theme in D. Now that section gets repeated.
You can just hear a theory teacher outlining the form and writing the boring letters of a typical rondo form on a whiteboard while the class yawns. It's nearly the same as any other boring rondo, save for the virtuosic 1st violin.
Then, for reasons known only to Haydn, the music switches to the parallel minor key and commences a full-on four-voice fugal exposition at the same fast tempo. After about thirty seconds of some highly unexpected harmonically active imitative development, the pieces changes on a dime back to the original theme in D major, as if the fugue had never happened.
Why did he do that? Was there an arrogant 1st violinist who he wanted to challenge? Was he just fucking around? I don't know the answer. But that Finale is fucking hilarious and you only need the most basic harmonic understanding to hear it.
Mozart and Haydn were constantly playing with form in similar ways to the example above. Mozart in particular played around with dynamic contrasts-- a sudden loud chord followed immediately by a soft one. That was an influence on Beethoven, for example.
It's the word "advances" which I object to. There's a value judgment attached to that.
You can dislike synthesizers and samples all you want, but there's no denying that they opened up new creative avenues for composers and sound designers.
What I will say is, arts do not advance linearly, more or less, like science does. You can't say that drama has "advanced" since Shakespeare -- it's just changed. So "what's popular?" is not a shorthand for "what's good?"
One sense of "advance" does mean to improve, but another commonly used sense is simply to "move forwards". History advances, literature advances, music genres and technique advance, time advances. None of those imply improvement or a value judgment, just moving-forwards and building-upon (or building-in-reaction-to).
You can absolutely say drama has advanced since Shakespeare, and few people would misunderstand. To say it hadn't would mean nobody had continued to write plays in the same tradition of western literature.
(See [1] and contrast definitions 2 and 3.)
> To say it hadn't would mean nobody had continued to write plays in the same tradition of western literature.
To say it hadn't, in my sense, would mean nobody has written any "better" music than Beethoven's 9th. Nobody has.
To say it hadn't, in your sense, would mean the form of the symphony hadn't continued to evolve, and of course you're right that it has.
All i've heard is mostly the same types of "sound" copied over and over again. Nothing jaw dropping so far (but there is definitely something that has to come out of this technological revolution one day...)
Doesn't mean anyone will be watching that dog video in 50 years.
> We should be asking: what is it that musicians are doing that sounds good? What patterns can we detect in the broad mass of music being made and enjoyed out there in the world?
I would personally add one more leading question: Can we explain music in other ways than by its harmony and chords?
A harmonic approach to analysis works fantastic for old European music, and pretty damn well for jazz too. For rock, it starts to oddly leave out important aspects of the music like rhythm, timbre, the way effects like distortion inform the harmony, vocal delivery, etc. And in the modern era, with all the advances and innovations made in the last 30 years in the now dominant genres of hip hop, pop, and electronic music, harmonic analysis is very poorly equipped to make sense of things in any meaningful way.
One music theorist who is attempting more competent analysis of contemporary music is https://www.youtube.com/c/12tonevideos. I'd love to see more of this.