There is a "Pride Goeth Before the Fall" sort of theme running through this all, or so it seems, when Shambles talks about complex harmony, and Whistlestop talks about haughtiness--To my view, whether you have a lot of "attitude" or not has no effect on whether you can pull off the musical ideas that you are working with--

Given that, I have to say that there are a lot of arrogant so-and-so's associated with all types of music(some with extreme talent, but most just extreme) and most of us delight in seeing them get their come-uppance, but unfortunately, it seems like that rarely happens--

at any rate, complex, multi-voiced harmonies, as well as counterpoint singing, all existed in folk music first--what composers have tended to do(at least our Western tradition composers) was to clean up and simplify the parts so that they could develop them into performance pieces for whatever venue they worked it in their time--

It is worth note that the Opera originated as a popular art form, open to the public, underwritten by admission sales, with story lines and grand styles created to appeal to the masses, who were(and still are) partial to extreme emotions and spectacle--

It is also worth noting that much of what we consider to be traditional music seems to have been composed music that moved from the written page into the oral tradition, where it was often passed down with surprisingly little alteration--

Given that folk music, pop music, and classical music have what, I guess, amounts to a symbiotic relationship, I am still at loss to explain the animosity, which is evident even in this thread, that divides them--