h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Great longevity is rarely granted to composers, so when Elliott Carter died last year at the age of 102, I began to think about the consequences if great composers of the past had had similar lifespans.

J S Bach [1685-1750] never had a chance to meet Mozart [1756-1791], which is a pity because Mozart wrote "At last! Someone I can really learn from!" in his journal when he first became familiar with Bach's work. Imagine Bach living into the late 1780s. Mozart could have studied counterpoint with the master. Bach would have just what Beethoven was looking for, as well. Beethoven griped that his teachers didn't teach him enough about counterpoint. Bach was a venerable teacher and a master of counterpoint. Granted, he would have scolded Beethoven for losing his temper, but then nobody's perfect.

If Mozart had lived until 1858, he could have coached Johannes Brahms [1833-1896], though he wouldn't have been Brahms's first choice.
Brahms admired Haydn, but extending Haydn's lifespan to 1834 would not have helped the one-year-old Brahms. Giving Beethoven until 1872 would have made him available as a teacher, but he would still have been too deaf to hear Brahms's efforts. Some have speculated that a longer life for Mozart would have meant late symphonies in the style of
Schumann, who was an early champion of Brahms's work. Brahms would surely have sat up and taken notice.

Perhaps the most provocative possibility would have been for Liszt [1811-1886] to live until 1913, when the ragtime revolution was in full swing in the U.S. Liszt was known to be a forward thinker who embraced what he called "the music of the future." Never one to get
stuck in a rut, Liszt cut back on touring while he wrote symphonies and choral works. Even when he played piano for audiences, he gave them transcriptions of the most popular tunes of the day, especially selections from opera. The notion of touring in the U.S. would have seemed like a new frontier for him, and he might have found a soul mate in the ambitious Scott Joplin [1868-1917], who aimed to branch out from piano rags to opera and symphonic works. Some expert coaching from Liszt might have made Joplin's later works more viable.

Some interesting speculations there, paulh!

I'm listening to Louis Moreau Gottschalk's "Bamboula" while writing this. Don't know very much about him so had to look him up. Born in Louisiana in 1829, died only 40 years later in Rio de Janeiro. I first heard about him after purchasing Dr. John's fabulous album "Going Back to New Orleans".

And now I'm thinking what would have happened had the two met in real life. Not possible, but had he lived until 80 Gottschalk could easily have met both Fliszt (as Victor Borge called him ) and Joplin

Going backwards in time, it would have meant that the very early music, without standardised notation, would have possibly been passed on from one choirmaster to the next, but the perpetrators and original singers would have been around for longer to prevent changes.

In fact, one could theorise that "preventing changes" would possibly be what Bach and Beethoven might have unwittingly done, and if they had all lived for such a long time, this might have slowed down progress. So Liszt may have met Joplin, but they might just be just scrambling out of the baroque period around 1900. We would be doing the Charleston in now in 2013, and Paul McCartney would die without ever picking up a guitar.

I was going to project your theory further into the future, but the above occurred to me and I wondered if it was worth it.

But, assuming Mozart did, under the circumstances mentioned above, write his Requiem, at least he'd have had a chance to finish it himself. He would have later had a whale of a time dashing off dozens of operettas.

Bach does seem to have been resistant to stylistic changes. I'm not sure that this would have put him at odds with Mozart, though. Even without Bach's help, Mozart wrote some very credible fugues, though they were still unmistakably Mozartean in style. Bach would have been grumpier with Beethoven, who was every bit as stubborn as Bach himself. Still, Bach needed the money -- he had three unmarried daughters to support. People do interesting things when they need money.

But, yeah, styles might have changed in a slower fashion. The thing to remember is that different countries came onstream at different times, regardless of the longevity of their composers. Russia and the U.S. were not part of the Baroque mix. Spain was a contender in the Renaissance and Baroque, but the strain of exporting some of its best musicians to the colonies in the new World prevented it from contributing much beyond Padre Soler, whom hardly anybody has heard of. Heck, they needed to import Boccherini, an Italian! In the 19th century, when opera was the most popular thing going, Spain had Zarzuelas, which were never as well known as the shows by Verdi and Wagner.

But I just picked extremely well-known composers whose respect for earlier composers was well-known. Mostly I matched up people hwo wished they could have studied with earlier people. Liszt-Joplin was a bit of a stretch, but I *knew* both composers were ambitious dreamers. An ocean stood between them, but Liszt was not likely to let that stand in the way of helping move things forward. The group he belonged to thought the symphony was dead, and that tone poems were the way to go. He would likely have talked Joplin out of writing symphonies.

A bit of a non seq, but while we're talking about composers working together:

We were in Bonn a couple of weekends ago. On a visit to Beethoven's house, I learned that he admired Haydn greatly and was dying to meet him, so he contacted him as soon as he got to Vienna in 1792. Haydn taught him for a while, but Beethoven didn't like him at all and soon quit his classes.

Beethoven claimed that he learned *nothing* from Haydn, but it's also true that Beethoven bought scores of many of Haydn's compositions so that he could study them. By 1809, when Haydn made his last appearance in public [at a performance of His "Creation"], Beethoven had come to realize just how talented the older man was, and showed great respect for him.

I probably erred by having Mozart give lessons to Brahms. Tchaikovsky would have been *much* more simpatico with Mozart. He even honored Mozart by writing an orchestral suite called "Mozartiana."

Also, I didn't mention that some composers lived beyond the age of 84 [Sibelius, Telemann, Rameau, Schutz, Richard Strauss, William Byrd, to name a few], and their influence does not seem to have prolonged the stylistic periods they lived in. Even today, when so many people routinely live to be 85 or more, the young are still restless enough to create new genres and styles. 102 is kind of n extreme lifespan. I wanted to show how readily the styles changed within one lifetime. Even without adding years, you could get from the Baroque to the 20th Century with remarkably few composers whose lives intersected. Telemann lived long enough to be a contemporary of Luigi Cherubini, who lived long enough to be a contemporary of Camille Saint Saens, who lived long enough to be a contemporary of Elliott Carter, who died in 2012. That's almost 335 years in just four composers.

There seems to be a certain pattern: The young and restless create (and try to re-invent and so on). Some of them stay in a rut once they've achieved success (financial or other), but others move on to refine their work and take it to higher levels more than creating newer stuff (even if they still create they stay inside the walls of their familiar patterns).

A few others, like the late great Frank Zappa, move on to do something almost yet not entirely different from what they did in younger years. I did not know this, but in his later years he spent a lot of time working with notabilities like Pierre Boulez (who conducted some of Z's work for symphony orchestra). In 1991, Zappa was chosen to be one of four featured composers at the Frankfurt Festival. The others were John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Alexander Knaifel.

Watch Zappa conduct in Frankfurt here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imAWVWi5PIU

As early as 1972 Zappa told an interviewer that his favourite musicians - the ones he listened to most - were Stravinsky, Webern, Varese and Penderecki.

He tells it so much better himself in this interview from 1994 - a few months before he died:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDYzuwG-gOE

Penderecki himself has changed over the years, so I don't know if his recent work would have excited Zappa much. I recently heard Penderecki's "Saint Luke Passion" and loathed it from beginning to end, but I recently read that what he's writing nowadays is much easier to take. I don't know as I haven't heard it, but I'm hopeful. Rautavaara has also changed quite a bit from his earlier style, or so I hear.

Webern and Varese are absent from my collection -- so many composers, so little time! -- but I have plenty by Stravinsky, who was another long-lived composer. I saw a late work of his on TV -- "Noah's Flood."

I have tried in vain to settle on a Frank Zappa CD for my collection. I borrowed two of his albums from the library. One was "The Greatest Rock band you never heard of" and the other one was "Joe's Garage." There still 85 that I haven't heard. Zappa is said to hold the record for greatest number of albums by a single artist or group. When did he ever have time to sleep?