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What Is the Value of Art? What Is Art's Purpose?
Since the brain wiring that connects emotion with music evolved in the Stone Age and has not changed, musical art can never progress, the way science and technology progresses.
The only thing music or any art can ever do is communicate emotion.
Emotions evolved as survival adaptations, so when an effective work of art makes an emotional connection, people recognize, perhaps unconsciously, the connection with survival. A work of art, such as a song, then, succeeds or fails on the strength of its emotional resonance. If it connects emotionally, it succeeds. If it does not, it fails.
When a work of art succeeds in connecting emotionally, it stays connected permanently, because human emotions don’t change over time.
A successful work of art, one that connects emotionally in most people, is called a classic. The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye has this to say about classics of dramatic art, equally applicable to classics of popular song:
Science learns more and more about the world as it goes on: it evolves and improves. A physicist today knows more physics than Newton did, even if he’s not as great a scientist. But literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic. Literature doesn’t evolve or improve or progress. We may have dramatists in the future who will write plays as good as King Lear, though they’ll be very different ones, but drama as a whole will never get better than King Lear. King Lear is it, as far as drama is concerned; so is Oedipus Rex, written two thousand years earlier than that, and both will be models of dramatic writing as long as the human race endures ... Whitman’s celebration of democracy makes a lot more sense than Dante’s Inferno. But it doesn’t follow that Whitman is a better poet than Dante: literature won’t line up with that kind of improvement.