In addition, I think you’re coming closer to appreciating newness in my (young) generation’s musical attitudes, too. I mentioned before the “blank slate” of genre and instrumentation that makes post-1999 music (international and otherwise) so interesting. You rightly point out how that this slate needed to be wiped clean; it had somewhere between 1,200 and 55 years of musical history scrawled all over it. So, in this early form of internationalization, certain artists “claimed” ideas from various times, countries, and social groups and recontextualized them as independent things.

So, now, when Saint Vincent uses a theremin on a rock song on national television, Crystal Castles uses hacked Game Boy Color equipment in electro-punk songs, or Doctor Dre uses a koto on his comeback album (to pick 3 Canadian/American examples), it’s just them picking the best idea from the assortment placed in front of them. (It’s why I think our pop music is better than anyone else’s.) It’s gone so far that someone like Bjork has tried to reintroduce ideas’ particularities. See: Biophilia, with its electronic organs, midi-gamelan, and Tesla coil bass.

However, there are some areas that weren’t taken back by musicians in the 1960s and 1970s. Central African pop hadn’t really been dug into outside of the Paul Simons of the world, so people raised a big fuss about Columbia graduates doing poor African people music when Vampire Weekend came around. If you do additional entries in this vein, I’d love to see something about American descendents of African slaves, African dance music, and this fertile 1960s and 1970s period. It wasn’t just sitars and harpsichords being reclaimed, after all.

A propos of nothing, except maybe the general Classical theme, is this meditation by a self-styled “reactionary” blogger on Soviet Composers and whether their state-imposed Kistchy-ness should be welcomed by conservatives as an anti-modern, populist gesture.

http://orthosphere.org/2012/05/17/socialist-realist-music-a-study-in-ironysvein-sellanraas-entries-at-the-orthosphere-under-the-rubric-of-reactionary-composer-of-the-week-have-provoked-lively-discussion-whi-5-2/