GuitarBizarre

What are you even arguing about? Everything has a structure if you analyse the crap out of it, but your previous argument was that structure is a means to an end, your current argument is that everything has a structure even if it was composed with no specific one in mind. You're at cross purposes with yourself.

Not to mention the secular or religious content of works from a given period is irrelevant when we're discussing the mindset that created those. We aren't discussing the rationale behind the presence or absence of religious feeling in a periods music as a whole, we're discussing the mindsets of periods of artistic endeavour and their relevance to the reduction in importance of explicit structure moving on from germanic traditions into the more broad base of western harmony in art music, including the rise of atonality, serialism, through-composition, the introduction of jazz (And a subsequent expansion of musical ideas to encompass microtonal harmony, already briefly explored by classical composers during the romantic vogue for east european and world music as applied to classical harmony) as a part of the western classical canon, forming a bridge between popular music and classical theory (Which in itself exposed a great number of problems with critical theory at the time, for example the inapplicability of schenkerian analysis to blues or black cultural music, it subsequently being replaced with the newer theory of "signifyin'" [Apostrophe included, really!] which became a crux for much of modern musical theory regarding the intermingling of black and white musical styles and traditions)

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