The Romantic era seeds from which Crescendo Rock grew--Leonard B. Meyer's observations on statistical accumulation and rejection of tonal syntactics in Romanticism and how we can hear that end point in, say, U2 songs

or "Leonard B. Meyer on the Romantic era shift from syntactic to statistical climax in music, in other words, crescendo rock is late, late Romanticism in pop"

Years ago I wrote about a piece at Slate in which an author inveighed against "crescendo rock". Carl Wilson vented some spleen about The National in particular and "crescendo rock" in general. What I wrote was over here but I'll quote a brief passage from the Slate piece to give an example of Wilson's invective against crescendo rock.


https://slate.com/culture/2013/05/the-nationals-trouble-will-find-me-reviewed-too-many-crescendos.html
...
And it’s silly to hate crescendos on principle: I fall for them when it’s Springsteen or Prince or Arcade Fire, where they testify to outsized romanticism. But as a stylistic fallback, the crescendo seems like a show of technical force at the expense of anything more idiosyncratic and weird. A crude version of feminist musicology might hear in it a masculine paradigm of song as erection rising to climax.

If the statistical climax is the only trick you've got then, even by the estimate of a self-identified poptimist, you're songwriting craft is weak.  That U2 has gone their entire career doing crescendo rock/pop is easily established.  To put this another way, a way that may seem more explicable to people who listen to classical music, every U2 song could be reduced to a kind of passacaglia or chaconne, in which a ground bass or core progression is endlessly vamped with a statistical accumulation of musical elements that builds up to the end.  It's not that this is an unusual tactic in pop song writing in the last forty years.  I can think of another example that is basically a "ramp" of statistical accumulation, the Shawn Mendes song "In My Blood" (I hate the song, by the way, but if you're going to insist on crescendo pop you might as well listen to this song as an example of how it's done.)

Yet what is the Ke$ha song "Praying" if not a variation of "crescendo rock"?  That would be a crude rebuttal to the crude version of feminist musicology that would propose that pop songs designed around statistical accumulation are paradigmatic of the song as an erection.  Now the super-post-Romantic variation of a statistical climax welded to a syntactic climax in the symphonic repertoire would probably have to be the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth.  For the record I'm really not into Mahler, either, but I can respect that Mahler knew how to write symphonies that are by and large longer and more over-the-top than this Haydn fan cares for.  

But I mention Mahler and Mendes because the point I'm making is that for Romantic era worshipers of Mahler or Beethoven the propensity to shift from syntactic climaxes to statistical climaxes was a process that began in the Romantic era, and the process was something noted by Leonard B. Meyer in his monograph on the Romantic era.  If you haven't read it it is:

STYLE AND MUSIC: THEORY, HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
LEONARD B. MEYER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
COPYRIGHT (C) 1989 BY LEONARD B. MEYER

ISBN 0-226-52152-4

For the purposes of this post I can't resist throwing in a few extensive quotes:

page 195
... Emphasis on the centrality of concealed underlying processes or principles has continued, affecting twentieth-century thought in many fields of inquiry, including, for example, linguistics (deep structure), psychology (Freudian theory), and anthropology (structuralism). In aesthetic theory, as elsewhere, there tended to be reification; the concealed principle, instead of being understood as a provisional hypothesis inferred from actual perceived phenomena, became what was real, while the sights and sounds of the world were appearance--surface manifestations of a more fundamental principle. From this point of view, organicism is Platonism in biological clothing. [emphasis added]

Both the composition of music and especially the concepts informing theory and criticism were, as we shall see, significantly affected by this strand of Romanticism. In composition, the ultimate consequences were methods such as those of serial and statistical music in which the compositional "seed" was explicitly and consciously contrived--an ironic outcome for an ideology that particularly valued unconscious, spontaneous inspiration!  The same ideological strand was at least partly responsible for the exegetic character of much music theory and criticism. For if the principles governing relationships in music lie concealed behind less important surface features, then it becomes the task of the theorist and critic to reveal this inner essence, whether it be Schenkerian Ursatz, a motivic germ, or a Fibonacci series. Thus theorists and critics become comparable to theologians or seers interpreting the divinely inspired message of the creator. 

page 201

... the Romantic repudiation of convention (and especially of neo-Aristotelian aesthetics, which had been associated with the ancien regime), coupled with the denigration and weakening of syntactic relationships, highlighted the presence of diversity. As a result, the basis of coherence and unity became an issue: How did disparate and individualized themes, diverse modes of organization, and contrasts of expression--all intensified by the valuing of originality--form an organic whole? How did the several parts of a set of piano pieces or the different movements of a symphony or chamber work constitute a cohesive composition?

The problem was especially acute in the aesthetics of music. In literature, significant weakening of syntactic constraints and hierarchic organization were never really viable options, and in the visual arts, at least until the twentieth century, coherence was significantly dependent upon iconicity. In both realms, the representation of human and physical nature--often with convention disguised by historical or ethnic exoticism--played an important role in creating artistic unity. But in instrumental music, "unity through representation" was not a possibility, except of course in program music. And it is not implausible to argue that program music flourished in the nineteenth century partly because the use of a program was a way of establishing coherence and, in particular, accounting for the juxtaposition and succession of palpably different moods, connotations, and the like. 

page 202

The role of similarity relationships in ensuring unity--usually through derivation from, or transformation of, a single germinal motivic cell--was emphasized by theorists and composers throughout the nineteenth century.  

page 220


Put aphoristically: radical individualism seeks to undermine the norms on which its expression depends

Go read it, it's great!  But today's post is going to revisit The Spheres of Music, a late work from Meyer's catalog, and I'll reference it because he managed to define what he called the distinctions between syntactic and statistical parameters and how those are relevant to forms of climax in music.

A warning Meyer gave years ago might be helpful to keep in mind reading music journalism and music criticism, whether of pop or classical:

The Spheres of Music: A Gathering of Essays

Leonard B. Meyer

Copyright (c) 2000 by the University of Chicago

ISBN: 0-226-52153-2 (cloth)

ISBN: 0-226-52154-0 (paper)

Page 272

It is important to recognize that the constraints that limit and influence the choices of composers may 

not be those that guide that apprehension and shape of the aesthetic experience of listeners.  …

Perhaps the core miscalculation of integral serialists and aleatorists with respect to music compositional practice and audience cognition could be summed up in a more colloquial way by way of words shared with me by my editor in my student journalism days:  "You know what you're thinking and I know what you're thinking as you wrote this piece because I've worked with you, but what you have on the page, readers aren't going to get what you're thinking. It's not something they're going to understand." Among the club of producers and performers there are things that will make sense but it can be as Tom Wolfe put it in The Painted Word, without a theory you can't even "see" a painting.  A good deal of "high" art devolved to the point of repudiating conventions past the point that anyone without a graduate degree could follow what's going on.  

As I noted in an earlier post, Meyer wrote that what composers understand about the music they write may not be the same as what they can explain to us if they were asked what it was they did.  What theorists and critics can do from formally opposite ends of critical engagement (general paradigms of creative decision-making applicable to the creation of art on the one hand, and engagement with the concrete realization of latent possibilities in specific works on the other) is fill in after the fact whatever it was that artists were thought to have done.  That's for the post I've referenced.  I am, really, trying to bring this round to crescendo rock and how it is a ball that started rolling a couple of centuries ago as the Romantic era began.  However, I'm doing all this preliminary writing to set the stage.  Meyer argued at some length that far more of what we might have been taught was "innate" was cultivated convention:

Page 274

Knowing—usually tacitly—what might have happened in a piece of music depends to a considerable extent on having internalized the constraints of some specific style, that is, having learned the repertory of possibilities and probabilities that influenced the choices made by the composer.  Understanding music, then, involves comprehending the relationships between actual, audible structure (relationships realized) and implies, imagined structure (relationships possible, perhaps even probable, but unrealized). Insofar as contemporary music theory slights learned stylistic relationships, it can account for only a small portion of the significance of compositions, often missing the richness and subtlety of musical relationships.

Page 276

I do not mean to deny the existence of universals or to minimize their significance for music theory.  But the universals central for music theory are not those of physics or acoustics but those of human psychology—principles such as the following: proximity between stimuli tends to create connection, disjunction results in separation; orderly processes imply continuation to a point of relative stability; a return to patterns previously presented enhances closure; and, because of the requirements of memory, music tends to have considerable redundancy and is often hierarchically structured.

The reference to hierarchy suggests another way in which our Romantic heritage has misled music theory. Though the yearning for Oneness, coupled with a desire for conceptual simplicity, inclines us toward analytic monism, it is important to emphasize that hierarchies arise precisely because the constraints governing structure and process change from one hierarchic level to another.  This is the case in the realm of music—as it is in the physical, biological, and social worlds.  Just as the principles governing the ways in which atoms combine to form molecules are different from those governing ways molecules combine to form cells, so the constraints governing the ways in which tones combine to form motives are different from those constraining the ways that motives combine to form phrases. And comparable constraint differences distinguish other levels of a musical hierarchy. Consequently it seems unlikely that any single kind of patterning will be characteristic of all levels of the compositional hierarchy.

Perhaps the most vivid case study of how a kind of aesthetic monism was imposed upon music analysis may be integral serialism.  That writers as ostensibly on opposite sides of the Marx divide in the Cold War years as Theodor Adorno and Roger Scruton could articulate the same core criticisms of post-Webernian serialism and Cage style aleatory is its own lengthy topic. What Meyer proposed in his later work was that twentieth century music analysis had been misled by the ideologies and legacies of the Romantic era.  It wasn't that, as noted above, Meyer did not think there were any "musical universals" but that writers on music were mistakenly imputing them to music itself rather than to the cognitive patterns shared across cultures by humans.  The quest for a monistic "universal" was not a problem because no such universals existed (and Ted Gioia has written that it seems musicologists and ethnomusicologists are loathe to concede musical universals exist) the problem is, per Meyer, that Romanticism has led the Western academic musicology and music scene down enough blind alleys that setting aside a quest for "musical universals" may be needed.

Not coincidentally, then, the last chapter/essay in Spheres of Music is "A Universe of Universals"

In one of those Meyer moments where he hides a great idea in a footnote we see:

Page 283

Footnote 6 paragraphs 2 and 3

Like all laws, the actions of universals is prohibitive, stipulating what cannot occur but leaving open a vast number of possible realizations on the levels of rules and strategies. But the action of universals can be contravened.  Gravity is a universal, but both birds and airplanes fly. Such contraventions, of course, involve special constraints: e.g., wings and muscles, wings and motors.

However, the contravening constraints themselves depend on the actions of universals—e.g., the physiology of living animals (in this case, birds) and the resistance of air.  This suggests a further, perhaps rash, conjecture: namely, that universals can be contravened only bu other universals while cultural constraints can be contravened either by universals or other cultural constraints.

From the text itself:

Pages 283-284

To explain why human beings in some actual cultural-historical context think, respond, and choose as they do, it is necessary to distinguish those facets of human behavior that are learned and variable from those that are innate and universal. But it is a mistake—albeit a common one—to conceptualize the problem as a search for “musical” universals.  There are none. There are only the acoustic universals of the physical world and the biopsychological universals of the human world. Acoustic stimuli affect the perception, cognition, and hence practice of music only through the constraining action of biopsychological ones.

Meyer declared that there are no "musical" universals.  Why?  Because the universals of acoustic stimuli and the biophysical universals of the human world are, neither of them, musical universals.  Music is the creation of individuals who are shaped by cultures.  Now it's not that I couldn't trawl through Ida Halpern's work on Native American music in the Pacific Northwest; ethnomusicological resources on Polish folk song; the Bohemian composer Anton Reicha's 36 Fugues; and Paul Desmond's "Take Five" and discover that, woah, there's quintuple meter in Native American, Polish, Bohemian, and American musics!  Now Andrew Durkin took pains in Decomposition to point out that there aren't even universals in human brain functionality, which was part of a larger argument against "authorship" and "authenticity" that I think mostly flailed but the point is worth noting, not all brains are the same so even the idea of neurocognitive "universals" should be used with some caution.

Even with that caution in mind, Meyer's larger argument was that "if" we are going to look for "universals" in music we should not look for them in music but in the possibilities and constraints of acoustics and in the possibilities and constraints of human cognition.  In other words, if you in some way say you're going to be a humanist than be a humanist, not some neo-Platonic post-Kantian idealist.  What might that mean in Meyer's way of putting things?  Take the constraints and possibilities of human cognition as your starting point before getting around to the music theory stuff:

.  

Page 284

The kinds of relationships that can be perceived and processed by the human mind are limited by neurocognitive universals. And these constraints account for many features of music—non-Western as well as Western. To take an obvious case, the minimum distance in frequency between pitches in a scale depends on human auditory discrimination. As a result, intervals smaller than a half step almost always serve to inflect structural tones.

Footnote 9 amends this, Meyer adds

9. I say almost because it is possible to devise microtonal scales in which, say, twelve pitches or sixteen pitches are supposed to be structural. But, to the best of my knowledge, no scales of this sort have ever become shared cultural constraints; and, unless human audition and cognition change significantly, it is doubtful that such scales will ever become so.

Back to Meyer’s main text

More important, the amount of information that the human mind can process is constrained by human cognitive capacities. In general, cognitive overload, which can be a matter either of amount or of speed of stimulus input, creates confusion and anxiety. In our age of electronic resources, this hazard has become very real. Vastly to increase the amount of information the mind must process—for instance, playing recordings of a number of different symphonies simultaneously—is to court the vacuousness of white noise.  …

Now we are going to get to syntactic and statistical climaxes and how crescendo rock can be seen as the far out point of realizing decision-making patterns in popular music that are paradoxically realizations of trends that began in Romanticism. I admit this is a long wind up.  Meyer has to lay down a lot of basic ideas about the human brain and the way humans make decisions and how complexity in one realm can be offset by simplicity in another:

Page 285

… the number of elements in any comprehensible relationship is limited by the cognitive capabilities of the human mind—by what psychologist George Miller called “the magic number seven, plus or minus two.” The repertory of tones in the music of most cultures is constrained by this universal. So, too, is the number of elements that make up patterns on the various levels of musical hierarchy—the number of motives in phrases, of phrases in themes, themes in sections, and so on.

The limitation on number is consequential. Just as, for instance, buildings increase in size not because their components (posts and beams, bricks and nails) grow larger but because the number of components increases, and just as living organisms grow not by expanding the size of units such as cells but by increasing their number, so pieces of music grow not by expanding the size of the basic elements but by increasing their number. Thus, though Bruckner’s symphonic movements are much longer than Mozart’s, their motives, phrases, themes, and so on are about the same length as Mozart’s. And forms can be expanded through the addition of large sections, as with second developments in codas.

Increase in size is, needless to say, constrained by culture as well as by nature. In the nineteenth century, the valuing of the sublime, of magnitude as a sign of power, and the taste of the audience for what I call statistical climaxes (see below) let to increases in the length and breadth of symphonic works. But the ways in which increases occurred were governed by cognitive universals.

For alert readers conversant in music history and Meyer's work you already know how all of this anticipates the rise of crescendo rock and probably didn't even need to read this far but if you have read this far, thanks. Contra Roger Scruton's assertions that music is not defined by convention Meyer argued that the Western tonal tradition of music is not some musical destiny toward which all tuning systems were evolving in the history of Western harmony (Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Music, page 242), Meyer instead pointed out that it took a century of triads appearing in Western music before they were validated by theorists as an acceptable convention.  To put this point plainly, the cognitive constraints which inform and undergird a musical convention are the real "universals" we should be trying to explore, not the "universal" of the triad that was a centuries long side-effect of part-writing practices born out of polyphonic writing.

Harmony was the side-effect, over centuries, of polyphonic conventions.  As music became less polyphonic or, rather, as non-polyphonic music developed in the wake of musical norms developed via tinkering, it became possible to regard triads and tonality as a norm.  Now that can be thought of as a syntax, which gets us, finally, to Meyer distinguishing between "synctactic" and "statistical" parameters of music:

Page 286

Because of the innate capabilities of the human mind, some parameters of sound can be segmented into perceptually discrete, proportionally related stimuli that can then serve as the basis for auditory patternings. In most musics of the world, this is the case with pitch (frequency) and duration, which are the basis for melody, rhythm, meter, and (in Western music) harmony. Because the largely learned probabilities and possibilities that govern successions in these parameters can be the basis for syntax, I have called these parameters syntactic.

Page 287

Innate cognitive constraints do not, however, segment other parameters of sound into discrete, proportional relationships. For instance, there is no relationship in the realm of dynamics that corresponds to, say, a minor third or dotted rhythm. And the same is true of tempo, sonority, and timbre. Dynamics may become louder or softer, tempi may be faster or slower, sonorities thinner or thicker, and so on. But they cannot be segmented into perceptually discrete relationships. Because they are experienced and conceptualized in terms of amount rather than in terms of kinds of classlike relationships such as a major third or antecedent-consequent, I have called these parameters statistical.

The implicative tensions of syntactic processes and the bodily tensions of statistical processes (e.g., insistent durational patterns, unusual speed, intense dynamics, extreme registers, etc.) seem to be inversely related to one another. The more forceful one is, the less compelling the other. This may be why a plaintive adagio seems more “emotional” than a persistent presto and why fulsome motor-tension seems excitedly active but not very “emotional.” Put crudely, marked motor activity tends to diminish cognitively generated tension (people go to the gym to “work off” their business-kindled frustrations). Similar highly motoric music—for example, Rossini’s William Tell overture—curbs patent emotional experience.

Page 288

The distinction between syntactic and statistical parameters can illuminate relationships in the realm of theory. For instance, tonal dissonance, which is a matter of syntactic function, needs to be distinguished from acoustic discord, which is statistical—a matter of amount rather than of function. Thus the interval of a minor seventh in a dominant seventh chord implies a resolution because our understanding of tonal syntax. But the implications of a minor seventh in a chord built of two perfect fourths are enigmatic because they are not constrained by a shared syntax. Unlike dissonance, which is functional, discord is statistical—a matter of amounts that result from factors such as the proximity of simultaneously sounding pitches and their partials, attack and dynamic level, the acoustic properties of the instruments, and so on Thus Schoenberg was right to speak of “the emancipation of dissonance,” but discord remains an unliberated universal.

Awareness of the action of these cognitive universals is vital for an understanding of the history of Western music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The attenuation of tonality, and hence of syntactic function, led to increased reliance on similarity relationships as the basis for form and coherence. However, because similarity relationships cannot beget functional differentiation, form increasingly became dependent on the structural of statistical parameters. More generally, similarity relationships give rise to class coherence [emphasis added] (e.g., a gathering of geese, a collection of citizens, etc.) rather than the coherence created by functional differentiation.

Footnote 20 adds

20. Conversely, functional differentiation is what distinguishes return from reiteration. Put too simply, because the recapitulation in a sonata form movement is separated from the exposition by the functional tension of a development section, the return of the first theme is understood as a “return” rather than a repetition.

In other words, as Romantic era composers and theorists repudiated the syntactic conventions of eighteenth century galant musical practice in favor of music governed by similarity relationships and statistical accumulation the Romantics of 1820 paved the way for riff-repeating crescendo rock/pop of 2020.

Meyer went on to point out something about human category perception that's germane to the blue note.  I'll quote Meyer in a bit but I'm reminded of how Adorno lambasted the blue note as not really any emancipated dissonance because whatever the blue note was against the major triad taken for it did not mean that it was ultimately dissonant.  If that seems dismissive on Adorno's part (which it was but ... ) keep in mind that false relations showed up in Elizabethan English choral music.  In other words, the blue note, if we only define a blue note as vaguely as a false relation in which a G# and a G natural co-exist in some musical moment above an E natural, depends on the stability of the associated triad to even be defined as a blue note.  In the century after blues became mainstream popular music I would go so far as to say that split-third chords in which a C major triad with an added E flat or D sharp can be considered consonant depending on how slow and steady the harmonic rhythm is but let me finally get to Meyer:

Page 289

The process of classification is strengthened by what psychologists call categorical perception, which is evidently a universal built into the nervous system, although the particular categories actually differentiated are largely learned. For instance, once the tonal relationships of Western music have been learned as categories of perception, if the third step of the major scale is gradually lowered, what we perceive is an increasingly out-of-tune major third until at some point, a categorical shift occurs and we perceive a minor third. Were it not for categorical perception, the “blue note” would long since have lost its color.

Page 290

Syntactic hierarchies are discontinuous in that their functional relationships generally change from one level to another. In nature, the ways in which atoms combine to form molecules are not the same as the ways in which molecules combine to form living cells, and this holds for the relationship of cells to organs. And it is because of hierarchic discontinuity that sentences rather than paragraphs, sections, or plots have been the focus of linguistic analysis. In tonal music, the probabilities of foreground chord progression are different from the probabilities of the succession of tonal areas, and the ways that pitches combine to form motives are different from the ways that motives combine to form phrases. Consequently, it seems very unlikely that different levels of a functional hierarchy, whether in nature or in culture, are governed by a single kind of process or structure.

To read Meyer is to get a sense that we in Western musicology, but particularly in the United States, may be suffering from some kind of granddaddy of meta-historical Romantic hangovers:

Page 291

The relatively recent concern of music theorists with the detailed analysis of hierarchic structure has led to an incongruous coupling—a coupling of nineteenth-century ideology and twentieth-century science. What seems to have happened is this: the Romantic esteem for the mysteries of the “profound”—in Wordsworth’s words, of “thoughts that do often lie too deep for words”—led to the valuing of what lay beneath the surface of things.  Misconstruing this belief, theorists in more than one field have been beguiled into believing that the “deepest level of structure”—for instance, the Schenkerian Ursatz or Jung’s archetypes—is “profound” and hence more significant than the patent patterning of the phenomenal foreground. [emphasis added]

But there is a “profound” difference between valuing a theory for its explanatory power and elegance and valuing the experience of the phenomenon that is explained. To call a work of art profound is to characterize the experience of that work, not to comprehend the general principles upon which it is based.  The “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” result from the personal experience of “the meanest flower that blows.” What is profound is not the deep structure of a flower (or of a piece of music) but the experience of a particular work—it’s power to move us.

Pages 291-292

Clearly, depth of explanatory theory and depth of aesthetic experience got mixed up.  … The more general a theory, the deeper it is said to be. But works of art are not propositions about phenomena; they are phenomena—phenomena that are valued for the specific experiences they provide. And, because such experiences are difficult to describe and fully explain, they are felt to be profound and often characterized as ineffable.

That's Leonard Meyer's variation of a ridiculous but memorable moment Chris Eigeman gets in Whit Stillman's Barcelona.

Now how might any of this connect to crescendo rock?  Whether he was thinking of it or not, Meyer went on to sketch out a kind of answer:

Page 292

Redundancy is a complement of information. Because of the limits of our cognitive capacity, the great the amount of information in one parameter of music, the higher the redundancy of others must be if relationshps are to be intelligible. From this point of view, the extensive use of a single motive in a development section does not (as is sometimes suggested) serve primarily to actualize the “full potential” of the motive. Rather motivic redundancy allows the listener to attend to the increase in harmonic information that accompanies modulations characteristic of development sections. Similarly, the greater the speed of a stimulus succession, the higher must be the rate of redundancy if the message is to be intelligible. Consequently, as in Rimsky Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee,” the redundancy level (per moment) of a presto needs to be higher than that of an adagio.

If many pop songs like the syntactic scripts of eighteenth-century sonatas this doesn't mean there aren't organizing principles at work, it certainly doesn't mean that there aren't meticulous levels of craft going into how people think through their crescendo rock/pop song.  What it does mean, for those whose musical training and tastes leans heavily "classical" but without any counterpoint/counterpart in appreciation of other forms and norms, is that crescendo rock is going to all sound the same, but this won't be because there are no differences from pop song to pop song, it will be because if you're trained to think in terms of what Meyer called syntactic parameters as the primary parameters for music you may not be trained to think in terms of musics which rely on statistical accumulation.

The irony of fans of Romantic music hating pop songs that rely on statistical accumulation to develop musical form and cathartic emotional moments of the sublime is that it was the Romantics, two centuries ago, who laid the foundation for crescendo rock in terms of Romantic ideologies and Romantic music practice. Similarity relationships and increasing volume?  That can be Romantic and it can also be "Whole Lotta Love"!  What's more "similarity relationships" then playing the same riff for minutes on end? Not that you care what I think but "Barracuda" is a better song. It might have something to do with having a verse and a chorus and, oh, yeah, a bridge.

Leonard Meyer didn't really anticipate crescendo rock, to be clear, because when he wrote his essay in 1998 U2 had already been doing crescendo rock for close to two decades.  What he managed to articulate, however, was that the aesthetics and compositional methodologies of what Carl Wilson would contemptuously call "crescendo rock" in the twenty-first century had a long pedigree and that pedigree went back to the Romantic era.  Meyer, specialist though he was among specialists on classical music, did more than most to state the formal-conceptual seed of crescendo rock that was planted in the ideologies and musical practices of the Romantic era.

When the Romantics were droning on about repudiating conventions and talking about how the name was smoke and shadow obscuring a heavenly glow of whatever the real thing was, they were not in a position to anticipate that two centuries on crescendo rock/pop was going to be a new normal.  For those who are steeped in musical styles and idioms in which syntactic scripts are the norm (i.e. eighteenth century sonata forms) possibly nothing could be more predictable or boring than crescendo rock.  You heard the first fourteen seconds and you'll feel like you've heard the entire song.  Whether you love or hate crescendo rock the crescendo rock song is gonna move on with or with you!