No politics...Free the Animus!
Schoenberg thought of himself as the new Bach. A piece that could be used in reply is the Gavotte II of Bach's English Suite in D Minor. It is quite obviously based on the idea of a peasant bagpipe. Relevant in this regard, whether or not literally true, is Kurt Sach's observation that because of Roundhead suppression of peasant culture during the English Civil war, without the deep cultural loam of an active folk music practice among the peasantry, the desertification of culture filtered upwards, so that, a literal fact, between the death of Henry Purcell in 1695 and the rise of Sir Edward Elgar in 1898, there was a greater than 200 year gap in native English born fine art ("classical") composers, Thomas Arne ("Hail Britannia") and Charles Avison (orchestral arrangements of Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord works) notwithstanding.
While the proposition is subject to endless debates pro and con, the principle that there must be an interrelation, a circulation up, down and between folk, urban popular, progressive-popular and art ("classical") music remains a valid organizing principle.
My studies reveal that there is a hidden cultural mother-lode more than a century old, prior to the influences that revealed themselves with the rise of twelve-tone technique: In the decade prior to the First World War, there were ten sheet music releases per year with more than 1 million sheet music sales per year. There were 300 piano brands in the U.S. alone. In 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' the family is so poor the children's growth is stunted, yet they have a piano and can play a few pieces on it, instructed by equally poor piano teachers for whom they barter precious food. The real life example is an American Catholic Bishop, Rembert Weakland, whose father died in his childhood and whose family were desperately poor, yet he had access to a piano.
A vignette from a Sommerset Maugham story, about a Church of England baptismal registration official, a Bursar, who is discharged from service because of illiteracy, who becomes the owner of 20 tobacconist shops, shows the effect: In the clip, the man bypasses an engagement party of young people singing popular songs in the parlor, played by one of the buyers of those 10, million sellers of sheet music.
There's a party going on in that parlor. It was the entertainment life of people who had no radio or sound cinema, but who had a fabulous time entertaining themselves and their music partners. Virtually everyone who, today, would be described as liking music, would have expressed that enthusiasm, by directly singing the music themselves. If You Wanted Music, Before the Development of Radio in 1923 (though most families didn't have a radio even by the start of the Second World War, even as most people didn't have a television even ten years later), You Had to Make It Yourself.
Twelve-Tone Technique was the necrosis in art ("classical") music as the mechanization of culture overtook what had been only a precious few years prior the active practice of culture on a popular level.
Jazz, it has been theorized, having conveyed the impressionistic tonality through the music of Irving Berlin (a disputable proposition), is still, certainly a hybrid, conveying the vibrancy of African music through the externals of the dying European art music. But today, it's a surprise to Jazz enthusiasts to find that young people are turning away from Jazz. However, there is a world of progressive popular music beyond the dying bounds of Europe and its cultural colonies.