I think today it’s very easy to produce music so what would have Mozart composed if he had a computer ?
I don’t know that he would have needed one. It undoubtedly would have made his scores easier to read, but other than that, what would it do that he couldn’t do already? He was extremely prolific, and I doubt he had much trouble writing out a score pretty quickly - maybe even faster than you could on a computer. I believe he was a good keyboard player, so if he needed to hear what something sounded like, he could simply play it, and for that matter, he probably knew what it was going to sound like already, just in his head. It’s very formulaic writing, and it’s not like he was experimenting with different tonal systems and wondering how it would come out. I’m sure he had a very good idea what kind of finished product he had in mind before he even started work on it. And at the time, there were trained musicians available and financial backing to pay them, so today’s concept of using synthesized instrumental sounds to replace live musicians and save money probably wouldn’t have made sense.
Really elegant and nasty viruses.
Since there exists no factual answer to your interesting question, I’ll move this. Rather than put it in IMHO, let’s go to Cafe Society, the forum for the Arts.
samclem GQ moderator
[ul]
[li]A MySpace page[/li][li]Music videos (which he would have put on YouTube)[/li][li]A letter to Falco asking what the hell Rock Me Amadeus was all about[/li][li]A note to his Gramma thanking her for the lovely stockings last Christmas[/li][li]The soundtrack to the latest Kingdom Hearts game[/li][/ul]
Also, within fifteen minutes of first discovering a record/playback capability, he would have done what everyone else does: wasted an afternoon recording his and his friends’ belches and farts, and playing them back at various speeds (backward and forward) and laughing like an idiot.
As lowbrass said, I don’t think it would have had any effect on Mozart’s productivity. As I understand it, he mostly composed in his head and just wrote out the finished product.
However, I can imagine him composing things that would have required a computer (or a syntheiszer) to play. (I know he composed for “weird” instruments such as the glass harmonica, and I seem to recall reading that he composed something for some mechanical device that would have been too difficult for a human being to play on an ordinary piano.)
Something like Aphex Twin, only better.
Don’t forget about spending countless hours at HotSalzburgGirlz.com.
Probably not much, as lowbrass and Thudlow have said. He obviously couldn’t use a computer to compose, and he didn’t need one to score or to play back.
Bach might have liked computers, though, as his music is more mathematical than Mozart’s. I think we’d have counterpoint with 60 parts. What a mindbender that would be!
Computer or no computer his work would still have, how to put it, too many notes.
A similar idea was discussed in the 1980 movie Fame. Music teacher Benjamin Shorofsky sees talented piano student Bruno Martelli playing with a synthesizer and makes a disparaging remark about it, claiming Mozart wouldn’t have used one. Martelli disagrees, saying in effect that Mozart would use whatever tools were available to him.
At the very least, I expect he’d use a MIDI program to experiment with his work before rounding up live musicians. At the very least, it would be a real timesaver. I wouldn’t use the movie Amadeus as a guide, suggesting as it does that Mozart simply rattled off perfect scores in some stream-of-consciousness fashion, with no need for revision or refinement.
Saying Mozart would have composed the same way even if he’d had computers available to him is like saying we all would write the same way even if we didn’t have word processors available to us.
-FrL-
Wrong, completely wrong. Computers can enable musicians to create music which could be heard no other way. I’m with Mike Fun, that Mozart would have seen the huge potential in electronic music and would have had a lot of fun with it.
The thing is, does the OP mean ‘what would Mozart have composed in 18th century Vienna with a computer at his disposal’, or ‘what would he have done if he was alive today’?
I came in to say that. “He’d make Aphex Twin’s oeuvre, and do it twice as good.”
Huh? What I said agrees with what you’re saying.
A lot of people on this thread are saying Mozart would have had no use for computers–he would have just done things the way he did in fact do them. I’m saying that’s false.
He would have used the tools available–why wouldn’t he?–and those tools would have had an effect on the way he composed music.
Perhaps I didn’t make this clear: I think word processors have greatly changed what it means, how it feels, what skills it takes, to write.
-FrL-
Ah, OK, I think I misread the negatives in your previous comment, and we do agree about Mozart. (I don’t agree with your position on wordprocessors, necessarily, though - but we’ll leave that one out of this thread)
He would have been to busy reading the Dope to write any music.
Lots of liberties were taken in Amadeus, but the idea that Mozart knew what he was doing before hearing it performed I think is pretty accurate. While it may be an exaggeration to say that he didn’t do any revisions, I can’t imagine he heard performances of his music and thought, “Gee, that I, IV, V, I progression I wrote sounds completely different than I imagined it would.” It’s very formulaic writing, and I honestly don’t think he would have needed to write, hear the playback, revise, hear the playback again, revise, etc…
Harmonically, Mozart was not an innovator. He wasn’t experimenting with new tonalities. He wrote in a firmly established style, and he did so magnificently. But he most likely had a very good idea what it was going to sound like before he ever put it down on the page. I can imagine Beethoven being a lot more interested in that kind of thing than Mozart.
Nothing, he would have just cruised for porn. If he got around to it…probably techno.