If he had been born in the 1700’s, would John Lennon have written and performed classical music?
Does the talent define the genre, or can someone with musical talent (or even genius) go into their genre(s) of their choosing?
True geniuses create new genres, but you can’t go from Bach to rock with no steps in between. You’d never get off the ground because you’d be making something that sounded more like noise than music to your audience.
Think of the scene from Back to the Future when Marty goes all Yngwie F&cking Malmsteen on the kids at the “Under the Sea” dance.
Seems like the OP isn’t talking about taking rock back to the 1700s, rather were Mozart born and raised in a similar timeline and location to Elvis, how would he fare?
That’s not how I understood the question
Either would have worked in the genre of his time. I don’t think Lennon would have been successful in classical music – he wouldn’t have been willing to sit still to learn theory and all the rest. However, there was popular music of the time and it’s possible he could have made a living writing and performing that. His career would roughly parallel how it went now, except he would never have made as much money – enough to get by, perhaps, but not enough to live well.
His music, though, would be forgotten today.
Mozart would have been successful with rock if he chose to write it in the early 60s (he still have preferred writing classical). It’s simpler music than classical.
In order for him to have gone all “Yngwie F&cking Malmsteen” on the kids there, he’d have had to have gotten drunk, made a fool out of himself by rambling out of control on his guitar and losing his backup band, and following it up by being a jerk to his fans and firing his stagehands.*
Anyway, to the OP, I think talent is largely independent of time and genre. I say this because classical music hasn’t gone away. Instead, I think the largest differences are culutural/contemporary and technological. That is, Mozart couldn’t have written rock simply because it just wasn’t technologically possible; however, the likes of one like Paganini show that the same sort of concept was there (give him a guitar instead of a violin, and he’s playing stuff that a modern day guitar virtuoso would).
I also think it’s not necessarily a fair comparison. It is enormously easier to make it as a musician/composer today than it was in times past. So while you still have your handful of Mozarts and Beethovens who would probably make it in any era, today you have a number of people who are able to make it today but may not have had the amount of talent it took in times past.
- I have a bad personal experience with him being a complete dick to me, not to mention hearing nothing but bad things about him from all the Swedish musicians I’ve met who have worked with him. All the prima donna stuff you’ve heard about him is true.
From Roger Ebert’s original (1984) review of Amadeus:
COULD Mozart have been a great rocker? Quite possibly.
I think the best composers and songwriters tend to gravitate to the dominant musical style of their time.
Sometimes people look atthe current Broadway scene and wonder “Where’s the modern Richard Rodgers? Where’s the modern Irving Berlin? Broadway used to spawn big hits. Where’d the great theatrical songwiters go?”
Well, I think rock and roll, and the singer/songwriter movement changed everything. A guy like Billy Joel probably WOULD have written directly for Broadway once upon a time. But once Beatlemania struck, he became a performer, and wrote songs for himself. A LOT of pop singers and musicians who MIGHT have gone to Broadway became performers instead.
As always, the answers to all of life’s questions can be found in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Yes, yes he could.
I think mozart would find the simple structures of rock music painfully boring and Lennon would have found the complexity of classical music frustrating.
As stated up-thread Lennon in the 1700’s would probably have been a folksinger. When he walked into a tavern they would pass the guitar (or whatever) to him and get him to sing a song. There wasn’t any money or fame in working class music back then, but he would have been appreciated by the people who knew him.
Mozart might be in a prog band today, or maybe jazz-fusion. Probably though he’d be composing difficult atonal music for the small group of people who appreciate that stuff.
I stand corrected. And I sit laughing.
There was a short story in Playboy in the 80s called “Gianni” by Robert Silverberg. Modern scientists used something called a time scoop to rescue a Mozart-type right before his death and leave a fake corpse in his place. They wanted him to compose new classical pieces, but when he saw how popular Rock n Roll was compared to Classical in the modern era, he totally embraced Rock (and its excesses) instead and died pretty much the same kind of death he was originally going to die from anyway.
What does this prove? Not much, except that someone much more facile than I about “what if?” scenarios wondered this same thing about 27 years ago.
Dude! Wasn’t that Bee-thoven?
There’s relatively little overlap between what it takes to write really interesting instrumental music and what it takes to be a rock star. Hardly any rockers have strictly musical talent near Mozart’s level, but many of them do have things like the ability to write catchy hooks and/or interesting lyrics, showmanship, self-promotion, and sex appeal, that weren’t necessarily part of being a classical composer.
Some composer/performers were the “rock stars” of their day (Paganini, Liszt), but opera stars may have been a closer parallel to rock stars.
I think most of the really great composers of the past would have found a niche somewhere in today’s musical world, but it’s hard to say where (though interesting to speculate). Some would be writing movie scores. Some would be musicians and/or composers in the classical tradition. Some would work in popular genres (like rock)—maybe as performers, maybe as producers. I could see Joe Haydn as the musical director for a late-night talk show, or something like that.
I like to think that some of them (I’m hoping Bach, personally) would be huddled over a pile of home-made electronics overjoyed that the imagination was no longer bound by the limits of the instruments of the time.
Damn you’re right. The point still stands.
I would think it would be hard for him. Lennon’s style in music never changed much. I am not a huge Beatle fan, but if I hear a song, I can easily pick out a tune penned by Lennon. Even in a song like “We Can Work It Out,” which was one of the few tunes, penned by them both, it’s easy to to see the Lennon parts.
Singers, not writers, like Jo Stafford, are very uncommon. Stafford could sing blues, pop, country, dance, swing and even rock and comedy. Which she had hit with.
Others have trouble making the transition. For instance, Marie Osmond is classed as a country singer. But even when she goes all out for that genre, she still comes off as “country tinged” pop. Comprare this to Crystal Gayle, who is best known for doing the same type of “country-pop” as Marie Osmond. Gayle can do both. This is not to say either one is better, they both have excellent voices. (Yes, Marie Osmond has a good voice, you may not like her music, but she can sing well)
Then you have great artists. Two of the biggest of the rock era were, Madonna and the Beatles. However the Beatles music, change the direction of music. The folk and softer music was set aside. Contrast this with Madonna, who didn’t change any style of music. Her tremendous success as she was able to see trends, and change her music style to have a hit with whatever kind of music the industry was leaning to.
This means a Beatle song sounds pretty much like a Beatle song whenever it was made, even over a period of years. But Madonna’s style is dated, cause she changed and very successfully marketed herself to whatever sub-style of pop was “in” at the moment.
The bottom line is people don’t have a lot of success in the type of music unless they like that style. The industry is chalked full of acts having one or two successful songs or even albums then quickly dying out, 'cause they change their style, a style they probably did just to be commerical or appease the record lable
Probably. He’d be bigger than Hermes, but not by much.
A serious discussion of What Would Mozart Do takes place in an early episode of Fame, with a synthesizer-using student having to defend the instrument to a more traditionalist teacher. The student contends that had Mozart had a synthesizer, he’d certainly have used it.
Could Mozart have been an R&B composer?
Maybe he would be composing soundtracks to movies like Hans Zimmer.
Well, genius does not just arise out of a vacuum. Mozart was born and bred to be a composer, taking lessons by age 3 and touring Europe before he was 10. The same thing with Beethoven, and all the other great composers. I think it’s the total absorption of music theory at such a young age that allows for such genius. It’s the kind of education that isn’t common anymore.
So I think that if John Lennon had began studying classical music as a toddler, he would have been an excellent composer. Most people probably would, I think. Probably not as great as Mozart or Beethoven, but competent at the very least.