As in the heyday of classical music, the musical artist of the future will not just be the hands that play the licks or the face that croons the tunes, but the mind that conceives of the sounds and structures.

That doesn't mean that future musicians will spend all their time navel-gazing. Instead, the wisest will go on a perpetual shopping spree of diverse musics. Pluralism will be the keystone of 21st-century music. Half-pioneer and half-alchemist, the future musician will bring together disparate sounds in inspired, and inspiring, ways.

In the 1930s, George Gershwin wedded the sounds of the street and concert hall to create Porgy and Bess, the first jazz opera. Three decades later, Miles Davis stirred elements of jazz and rock into a Bitches Brew that would influence the taste of experimental music throughout the 1970s. As the coming century unfolds, such multi-cultural genre-jumping will become the norm, not the exception.

While stylistic cross-pollination can result in beautiful hybrids, it will also result in uninspired jumbles. Mediocre artists will feign creativity not by copying a given style, but by merely tossing clichés into a musical Cuisinart. Avant-bubblegum, tribal & western, baroque ska, adult industrial, zyde-core, new jack bluegrass, and doo-wop death-metal are just a few of the monsters that will come flying out of Pandora's Jukebox before a grassroots movement scrubs the slate clean. This new traditionalism will be more than just a rehash of early jazz, 50s folksong, or 70s punk — though each of these is sure to get another 15 minutes of fame.

With the increasing availability of multimedia technology, grassroots performers won't be restricted to strumming battered guitars. The Internet will replace the campfire and the coffeehouse as a musical forum. "Open-mike" sessions will bring together digital players from around the world, allowing engineering students in Dubuque and civil servants in Sarajevo to jam on the latest grooves.

With impersonal performers, stylistic diversity, pseudo-classical restraint, and cutting-edge technology result in complete chaos? Is the future of music doomed to keep swirling and subdividing into fractal-like flurries of neo-post-world-alternative sub-sub-sub-genres? Will any values surface to make sense of the scene and tighten the loose canons of the post-postmodern soundscape?

My prediction is both highly idealistic and unfashionably traditional. When the whirlwind slows and the dust settles, three old standards will remain: emotion, imagination, and talent..