IB: Pop music is about all sorts of things that classical music isn't about - how much of pop music is about sex and dancing? Classical music isn't directly, I suppose Tristan and Isolde is about sex, but only in a rarefied way.

DJ: In a sense, that's the whole point of it; that there is something beyond purely earthly sensual love. What about Schubert, on whom you are a great authority?

IB: Schubert is the model for the late-20th- century adolescent love ballad. I'm reading a book by Lawrence Kramer - this sounds very post-modern - the constitution of the modern subject seems to be focused on this idea of lost love and impossible love, which comes out of Schubert and has been inherited by a lot of modern pop, the gloomy end of modern pop. So it remains important. I suppose that I prefer Schubert because I think he's musically more interesting.

DJ: Isn't this actually a bit of a regression rather than an evolution? Schubert's songs are much more musically complex, and also emotionally complex.

IB: They have the capacity for irony, and the way the music relates to the text is perhaps more complex. Sometimes, the text is terrible - it's sometimes interesting historically - but the text is also often wonderful.

DJ: He did try to find the best poets of his time, huge numbers of them; Goethe, Schiller...It would be an extraordinary thing today for a musician in the pop tradition to use a leading poet to write his lyrics.

IB: Yes, there's much more separation in that sense. I always think of the period where Pic-asso, Stravinsky and all those people were working together and interested in each other. I don't think modern artists are very interested in working with classical musicians. By classical musicians I mean people who are working with the stuff of music and trying to push it forward - experimenting, pushing the boundaries of music, which I don't think pop music, on the whole, is doing.

TB: There's one connection which occurs to me there - I think some pop musicians are very ambitious - David Bowie, about whom we've just had a very interesting article, is a case in point.

IB: But it's interesting - he's ambitious in producing a whole artwork, it's about presentation, it's about the way he dresses, but the actual music is terribly conservative. Some of the tunes are very nice, but the musical material seems to me very reactionary. "Life on Mars" is a wonderful tune, but it's really just the sort of tune somebody could have written in vaudeville in 1915.

TB: Yes, he and his producer could often do quite a lot with such tunes. I'm not a fan myself, but the point I was going to make is that so many of these pop musicians, including Bowie, come out of art school.