It’d be fun to go back in time with my ipod and play some modern music for history’s great composers. Would Mozart like jazz, The Beatles, dubstep…?
I’m going to slide this over to CS.
He might like This song.
I think the iPod itself would be so distracting that Mozart wouldn’t even identify the sound coming from it as music. An intergral part of his appreciation of music would have been vibration and observation, neither of which a mere recording can provide. To give him a fair shot, I think you need to make room in your time machine for a few actual modern musicians and their instruments.
My guess is it would depend on what age you reached him at. Mozart as a kid? Sure. Mozart as an adult with established tastes? Not so sure. My guess is he’d have found much of it clashing and simplistic, or else nonsensical.
I remember a weird time-travel short story in which Mozart was brought forward into the present day. He was relatively young (although not a kid) and was initially astonished to learn all that he had written… and then became sort of morose. What was the point in still writing, if he’d already done it all?
I’m surprised if these are so integral to his appreciation of music that he would literally fail to recognize the sound as music. Can you provide some support for the idea?
Actually, I’m surprised if “vibration” has much to do with his appreciation of music at all (other than in the trivial sense that all music, being made of sounds, is thereby made of vibrations in the air), but I’m willing to be educated.
Mozart understood the simplicity of Folk Music (music created by musicians who are commonly not classically trained, often from a purely oral tradition).
He also understood rhythmic music (Turkish music was a rage in the 18th century).
He also understood non-musical effects and spectacular displays (e.g. Opera).
But I think he would be dismayed how Musical innovation has been totally suppressed, and baffled by the homogeneous blandness of popular music.
He didn’t even like his own music. As a matter of fact when they dug up his body, they found him…
I think he would think of current music much like we think of jingles on commercials - a brief snippet of sound that may or may not be momentarily pleasing.
He might be slightly more impressed by some Broadway musicals, and I think he might also be more impressed with musical soundtracks to some epic films.
I would also suspect he would really, really like the idea of a sound studio where he could go back in and micro manage every single note and instrument to get exactly what he wants, and have it recorded for posterity. That would impress him.
He would hate it. Think of how today’s seniors react to today’s music. Then push that back a couple of centuries. He probably wouldn’t even consider it music at all . . . and I tend to agree.
You wouldn’t be able to drag him away from the likes of the gross-out movies of the Farrelly brothers and the Jackass movies. He was into that shit. I’d rethink any particularly highfalutin expectations, but I would want to listen to Zappa’s Hot Rats with him.
I think Mozart would be stunned by the sheer volume of the ambient noise in our society. Consider - in his day, there were no cars, no trains yet, and steam engines were in use only in mines and factories. None of our electronic sources of sound existed; the loudest sounds would have been natural events such as thunderstorms.
I think it would take him quite a while to get used to the level of sound which we take for granted.
There are some angry, yet amusing rants written by nineteenth century Schopenhauer about the terrible noise of coaches rattling on cobblestones beneath his window, sellers shouting out everything they today have written signs for, and most of all the loud unexpected sounds of whips cracking by horse-drivers.
And yet, somehow, it still is.
I expect that Mozart would feel the aural equivalent of a diet consisting entirely of fun-sized candy bars.
Lest you think he would be appalled by our vulgar, on-our-lawn hip hop music music, don’t forget that this is the man who wrote “Leck mich im Arsch.”
I move we begin immediately to develop a genre of music I dub harpsichord rap.
I’m trying to envision that version of The Magic Flute, with the character Bitch of the Night, yo.
Some brilliant musicians, at least, seem to have had a healthy appreciation for music that was far-removed, chronologically or in genre, from the kind of thing they themselves composed. Based on this, I’d like to think Mozart would enjoy and appreciate at least some modern music. On the other hand, it might take him awhile to get the hang of the musical language that some of it uses.
I think he would ask “What is that instument?”; “What is that sound?”; then he would demand you provide him with a Korg Kronos or some other fantastical music workstation and he would compose his next symphony, being blown away by the fact that he could do it all himself without any other musicians.
He might regard most modern music to be trivial. I doubt that he would hate it. It would be interesting to see to what he was initially drawn since most of the music on the radio was produced long after his time; would he be able to easily to discrimnate between the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, etc.