Music, at least what is popular, changes a great deal over time. As modern listeners we can hear music composed long ago and performed with period instruments etc. We can also see the beauty in that music (sometimes).
Is music a progressive experience? If in some way (time travel, or whatever ficticious construct you care to use) a person from 500 or 1000 years ago could hear modern music, would they / could they enjoy it?
rainy
Interesting idea.
I suspect the cultural divide would be too great. Other than appreciating, for example, the physical skills of performers, it would prove inpenetrable, at least for most people and for a long time. Rather like initial European encounters with very distant non-western musics.
One thing that would certainly be a shock to our ancestors would be the sheer volume - never mind electronics, even a modern piano or violin would sound incredibly loud to somebody from the 1700s. As for an orchestra or electric amplification, it would be astonishing, and perhaps unpleasant.
I’d think they’d recognize it as music, but find it completely obnoxious.
Listen to the music of Bill Hailey with today’s ears - personally I find it the guitar sound tinny, the vocals weak, the bass non-existent, and in general pretty lacklustre. Then consider that it was a complete revelation to the youth of the day, and that the contemporary older generation viewed it with total horror.
I would imagine that you could multiply such reactions by a large factor if you were to, say, play The Aphex Twin at the court of Henry VIII.
I think people will still be listening to today’s music for a long time as well. Perhaps a few pop fads will fade, but the good stuff is here to stay.
That’s very true. But it doesn’t address the OP, which isn’t about how music is received by future cultures, but how it would be received by past ones.
A presumtption of distaste on the part of older ears for newer music presupposes a conservativism on their part.
I think many musicians of 200 years ago would love today’s music for many reasons.
The earliest symphonic works often emphasized the ability of newer instruments to have a greater range of volume than older ones. I believe it was an early symphony by Steinmetz (sp?) that contains several passages where the orchestra repeatedly plays the same note over and over, getting louder with each repetition. I can only call it the earliest example of the use of the power chord.
I think ears seeking such a sound would be amazed and delighted at the modern ability to achieve the same effect by plucking a few strings on what amounts to a tricked up lute.
Many musical practices have survied the ages. The sequential pattern of baroque music was preserved in mid-20th-century jazz. The jazzmen loved baroque. Why wouldn’t the baroques love jazz? I would suspect a similar affinity for the classicalists and romanticists for rock.
Hip-hop? New words (sometimes unintelligible) chanted over borrowed music? What’s the difference between that and renaissance motet?
Not necessarily. Even progressive and open-minded musicians prior to around 1500 would have a major stumbling block - the importance we place on instruments. Before then, these were very much secondary, with vocal music being far more significant. The idea of sitting and listening to two hours of instruments with no voice would seem truly bizarre.
I agree. But the OP asked about a larger timescale than that.
Yes, there’s parallels, and they can go further back. But these only form isolated scenarios where there would be appreciation - they don’t prove that a majority of all earlier musicians would be appreciative of a majority of modern genres.
No trained musician from the past worth his or her talent could stomach the way music has been turned into an oboxiously over-marketed product for mass consumption.
There’s nothing “modern” about popular music, anyway. The chords, the progressions, the rhythms, the basic song form, the melodic idiom: all are old, old, old.
My guess is that very, very little popular music as we know it going to survive the test of time. (How many of you dopers care about popular music from the 1940s?)
Who said it had to be popular music?
The ancient kids would love the new music and it would drive thier parents nuts.
D’oh! You’re right, my apologies. I got things backwards.
I imagine Paganini would love most of today’s speed metal and some of the guitar heroes like Satriani and Malmsteen. In fact, I bet most of the composers would dig a lot of the highly technical stuff that’s out there today.
In this book, the author writes that certain sounds that we consider pleasant, and which are commonplace in western music, were once considered decidedly unpleasant. Things like the 7th chord, for example, that we couldn’t do without. He argues that inventive musicians would push the boundaries by incorporating something thought discordant, after which the new thing would become commonplace.
If this is the case, probably an ancient listener would find music which we consider very pleasant to be noise, much the same way I, personally, find 12-tone music.
Moderator’s Note: Moving from Great Debates to Cafe Society.
I dunno…a lot of it would probably sound like a torture device used by Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan.
I’m probably only chiming in with what everyone else has already said, but I think a good deal of today’s music would sound jarring and cacophonous to ancient ears.
Not so much about the instruments, although a heavy-metal crashing chord on an electric guitar would scare the living bejeesus out of our poor ancient guy 
Most instruments today are really variations on older instruments; guitars can be linked back to any stringed instrument–lyres, zithers, harps, etc. The sound may be louder and clearer, but I don’t think it changes that much.
I think it’s more the music itself; a lot of today’s songs in the 20th century reflect the jazz experiments with atonality, ‘abstract’ melodies, and dissonant (dominant and diminuitive) chords, as opposed to simple, repetitive tunes and basic major / minor chords.
This is what I meant by progressive in my limited to nonexistant music theory vocabulary. Is our apprecaition of modern music built upon exposure to all that came before? Would ancient ears listening to music today find the experience something like tuning into the season finale of ‘Lost?’