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Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

Why there are no Bachs, Mozarts or Beethovens of today is to me one of the world's greatest mysteries.

Nobody writes in that style of music anymore. It's "already been done". Even if someone wrote something as good as Beethoven's 5th, nobody would care. The classical music world has been there, done that. Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler aren't remembered just for their music on its own, but the fact that their music pushed the envelope, invented new forms of expression. They didn't just do it, they came up with it.

Classical composition moved in a kind of academic, atonal direction in the 20th century which was completely inaccessible to most of the public, and essentially died, in terms of a popular artistic movement. After Stravinsky, there just wasn't really much left to do. (Composers still write movie scores, but these basically just rehash what was already done in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)

Instead, the world moved towards rock, pop, hip-hop... and there's a lot of exciting stuff there. Unfortunately, it's mostly based around 5-min songs, which limits its complexity. No matter how genius something like Brian Burton's "The Gray Album" might be, or certain Led Zeppelin songs, the format doesn't allow for even 5% of the kind of complexity that a symphony can embody.

So the Bach's, Mozart's and Beethoven's are surely out there -- but they're not doing the same kind of music, and they're harder to recognize as equivalents because we've abandoned musical structural complexity for sonic complexity instead (it's more about the sound or flavor or texture of a track, its hooks, and so on).

It's weird and false to imply that classical composition no longer exists. Classical was one of the first fields of art to retreat from mid-century modernist experimentation and get back to basics. Minimalism reintroduced such essential elements as rhythm and melody as early as the 1960s. While there's still a large avant-garde contingent, most successful living composers walk a very interesting line between the new, complex and accessible.

It's not a popular music story at all - pop/folk music has always been doing it's own thing.

Oh it definitely exists -- heck, I sang in a New York premiere of a Jennifer Higdon piece this spring. But it's not popular. It's incredibly niche. There's isn't nearly enough general interest in it for there to be another Beethoven equivalent today, as a figure in society in general.

Got it, your language was a tad to declaritive.

It's certainly niche, and painfully so. I think there is some potential for growth, given the absurdity of my aging friends forcing themselves to continue to engage with music written predominantly for teenagers and college students.

> It's "already been done"

But that's a terrible, awful reason to not write music in that old style! If Mozart were alive today, wouldn't he still be writing music in his style? So what's wrong with somebody else writing it for him, now that he's dead. Maybe it's difficult to sell, but still.

In these other types of music the talent seems much more dispersed. Like there's a lot of great stuff, but no dominant creative figures.

I think it's the other way around. There's lots of great stuff, and lots of dominant creative figures, such that it's impossible to pick through all the geniuses to find just "one" to be the "best".

Part of why the Classical composers loom so large in our minds is that they were the only "genre" of music available (by the rich modern standards of the term "genre"). We look backwards, and they are all there is to see. Now there's a bajillion genres, and many of them are full of very smart, experienced people plugging away.

I do not mourn this turn of events. I celebrate it.

(And yes, I am well aware that "Western" music is not the only kind and there's rich traditions of music in all ethnicities, etc etc. Still, Western music of the Classical era was something special and I don't think it's amiss to observe that. In the end, what they created was for all humanity, as evidenced by how quickly it has spread to all, and it is not surprising that when we look back, what we see is Bach and his progeny, which includes Beethoven.)

But there are. That is to say, if you mean exceptionally talented composers of classical music.

See Gyorgy Ligeti, Arvo Part, John Adams, George Crumb. Phillip Glass, and Nico Muhly. Everyone except Ligeti (RIP homie) is still living last time I checked.

It's too soon to tell. You would need 200-300 years to go by to know. And among the countless contemporary artists today, a tiny handful will be recognized for their enduring contribution to music.

I don't know about that. I think every major composer up to the mid 20th century gets a fair shake - and are undoubtedly not in the same league as the aforementioned 3. Composers from the last 70 years are harder to evaluate owing to the 'post-melodic' trend.

They're not writing classical music. But I'm sure they exist. David Bowie was amazingly inventive. Other examples?

David Bowie is great, but if you were to catalogue his output, abilities, and achievements I think they would pale severely in comparison to Mozart. I can believe that music is overall just as great as ever, with the millions of contributors globally, but where are the towering geniuses?

I think that's not true. Its nice to extoll Mozart but their catalog might be commensurate, you'd have to do the legwork. I say, geniuses are all around us but we're acculturated to say 'the old masters can't be beat' without actually adding it up.

The 'Complete Mozart' collection is like 180 discs. And he died age 35!

And most of it is not remembered by even most of those who likes his music.

The reason his output is so huge is of course because he for several periods was employed as a composer and had to churn out large number of compositions.

That's not to say that there's not lots of good material there, but it's not like his entire output is of sufficient quality to keep most people interested.

Still, I'd wager that if you pick a random Mozart piece it's got just as high a likelihood of quality as a random Bowie track.

Secondly, I suspect that the situation whereby musicians these days aren't expected to pen a large quantity of compositions is one of the prime reasons for the mysterious shortage of Mozartesque prodigies.

"Thick as a Brick" by Jethro Tull is the first thing that comes to mind. It has the length and variety of style that you'd expect from any classical symphony.

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