Re. originality in popular music, see this video. Don’t miss the section starting at 2:39. This video by the Axis of Awesome is fun, too.
What these mashup videos show is that a lot of modern songs are essentially variations on a single ground bass. Whether this means that they “lack novelty” arguably depends on what exactly you mean by novelty (I certainly agree that Mozart was not original in the way Beethoven was), but even Beethoven wrote in this musical form (see e.g. his 32 Variations in C minor)
I just don’t think that it proves much, beyond what I wrote above. Given how consonance and dissonance work, it’s somewhat to be expected that playing many variations at once on the same ground can result in (consonant) music.
What these mashup videos show is that a lot of modern songs are essentially variations on a single ground bass. Whether this means that they “lack novelty” arguably depends on what exactly you mean by novelty (I certainly agree that Mozart was not original in the way Beethoven was), but even Beethoven wrote in this musical form (see e.g. his 32 Variations in C minor)
You missed the section starting at 2:39, didn’t you?
I just don’t think that it proves much, beyond what I wrote above. Given how consonance and dissonance work, it’s somewhat to be expected that playing many variations at once on the same ground can result in (consonant) music.