Besides the fact they they’d likely be in awe of our recording and amplifying and playback technology, of course.
I just have to wonder how composers who were trained to fairly rigid rules and musical structures would react when exposed to, say, jazz. Or disco for that matter.
I imagine there would be a group who would be outraged, that the breaking of their music standards would be some kind of insult or apostasy. And there would be another set who would new potentials in the freedoms that music has … achieved?
I’m also curious how the original composers would react to hearing modern reinterpretations of their music but groups like ELP and Deodato.
I’d like to think that, by and large, they’d be ecstatic, and would be stimulated to create new work that would put us in awe of them all over again.
I’d like to think that if you put Haendel, Mozart, Bach, Hayden, and Beethoven together in a room full of modern instruments, they’d start experimenting right away and be jamming in a very short while.
Jamming is, of course, the foundation of jazz. These guys were both creative and familiar with different time signatures, rhythms, harmonies, and so on. It would be interesting to hear what they’d come up with.
You might want to check out Robert Silverberg’s 1982 short story “Gianni,” which depicts the exact scenario you’re describing. Scientists bring Baroque composer Pergolesi to the present (2008 in the story) and he becomes enamored with a drug-fueled pop genre that Silverberg calls “Overload.”
I think that’s pretty much how it would go. They’d go completely nuts with all the additional tools and resources available to them.
My assumption is that they’d need exposure to more modern music to more or less free their minds from the strictures put upon them by their own musical learning and their cultural norms. I’m not sure that merely modern musical tools would be enough to turn their creativity in new directions.
In terms of more modern classical music, I’d love to see and hear how they react to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, for example.
You have proved my assumption wrong. Clearly Beethoven was WAY ahead of his time, and thinking far beyond the musical conventions of his day. That astonished me!
There’d be a lot for them to get used to. For instance, on hearing modern, or even 19th century, music, Bach might complain, “The harmonies are all wrong, the rhythm is so irregular, and there’s no counterpoint.”
I don’t think they would understand it. A lot of it wouldn’t have any meaning as music to them, at least without a long period of metabolizing. I think it’s projecting to think they would.
That’s why they called it musical “progress” for all those centuries.
I think that one of the things that would amaze historical musicians is the utter ubiquity of music in our modern lives. It is everywhere. It is background in shopping, dining, transportation, entertainment of all sorts, etc. Music is everywhere in our daily lives. They would also be amazed at the ubiquity of high-quality instruments and the people to play them. In the United States, musical instruments are taught to millions of school children every day (I know – I teach a few hundred of them myself). An ordinary musical instrument in my school band is far superior in quality and craftsmanship to the very best and expensive musical instruments of the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries.
Hearing modern music they’d be incredibly impressed, and humbled because their own works pale in comparison. Some think they’d even regret creating their own music in the first place. And to verify that they recently opened Beethoven’s grave and found him decomposing.
Yeah, music was an ethereal thing up until the phonograph. Classical composers would be spending most of their time wrapping their brains around that different reality.
I can see Bach or Beethoven making use of our modern tools, but likely to make versions of the music they are familiar with.
In the book Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, by Robert Jourdain, he discussed the “deep harmonic structures” that Classically trained musicians and composers end up getting wired into. THAT is their primary focus - those deep harmonic structures. If they could use our modern tools to tap into that level of musical composition, it could be cool.
I could see Bach using a looper and having a field day playing with his different harmonic lines, setting up layers of sound and riffing on top of them.
Would Bach dig jazz, like Martian Bigfoot’s infamous Beethoven link? I don’t know - Bach’s biggest priority was demonstrating how polyphonic lines can intersect using a well-tempered scale approach. I think he would understand what jazz musicians bopping against each other are doing harmonically, but as the capellmeister of the big church in town, he would have no tolerance for “messing around” - he did do improve, but all focused on his precisely-structured harmonic lines.
I think Beethoven would dig Pink Floyd’s music, but be repulsed by the vocals. Frankly, I think most modern vocals would turn the great composers off.
If that’s what it is for you have at it. I was talking about the expansion of the musical palate which has happened too, in rock, blues, jazz, classical etc.