There is a recurring bugaboo in talk about music and the wider culture that often comes in something like the form of the following questions or statements:
Why do we not have any more Mozarts or Beethovens?
Who are today's Mozarts and Beethovens?
If Mozart were alive today, he'd be writing pop music.
Why are there no great women composers?
I'm going to address the first question mostly, but the answer to it covers the others. There's a bit of an agenda behind this question. Obviously, I have an agenda, too, that is against the implications of the question. I am taking a long, circuitous route to lay out my agenda, because there is actually a lot to unpack behind this question: many assumptions, history, cultural norms, values, and relationships.
Why Mozart and why Beethoven? Mozart and Beethoven have the following advantages:
• People know who they are, even if they are not interested in classical music. People can sing the opening melodies to Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Beethoven's Symphony #5.
• They are far enough removed from the present to be part of a supposed golden age, but close enough to be part of modern times. Great composers like Josquin or Ockeghem (to name but two of hundreds) are too far removed from our modern times and most people have never heard of them or their wonderful compositions. Their compositions are also not based in the same sorts of musical structures and values that are still in play today, in the way that Mozart's and Beethoven's are. (In some ways, yes, but in the most obvious ways, no.)
• They have quasi-magical, archetypical back-stories (the savant, the overcomer) that are still interesting to people today and that can be manipulated to uphold today's values. What can we say about Bach or Vivaldi? — Especially Vivaldi, whose Four Seasons concerti are possibly even more well-known and recognizable than anything by Mozart or Beethoven. Bach is known for being devout and fathering an outrageous amount of children. Vivaldi was a Catholic priest. Those are less compelling stories to modern folk.
Some teacher once told me that "great composers" could be very generally categorized into innovators and synthesizers. Innovators push things forward; they are the ones who move the culture from one stylistic period into the next. Synthesizers pull the various strands of a style together and take it to its highest heights. These are very broad strokes and obviously made in hindsight! Claudio Monteverdi did not wake up one day, sick of the Renaissance and all of its trappings, and decide to create "Baroque" music instead, for example.
But in this light, looking at the bookends of the 150 years of the Baroque period,1 Monteverdi was an innovator, Bach was a synthesizer. Both Mozart and Beethoven spent time with the innovator Haydn (who lived long enough and was so prolific, I wonder if he is viewed by any scholars as both an innovator and a synthesizer). Mozart was the grand synthesizer of the Classical period. Beethoven was the innovator who pushed the Classical into the Romantic.
Of course, no one does this alone! Austin Kleon loves to talk about Brian Eno's concept of "scenius," the idea that no one is working in a void and that any artist has friends, mentors, tastes, predecessors, curiosity that influences their work. I am glad that Kleon and Eno are promoting this idea because it is a more realistic paradigm than the "Great Man Theory" which posits that these mysterious men with their mysterious abilities (more on that shortly) spontaneously generate as a gift from God, not unlike Aristotle's theory that eels are spontaneously generated from the sediment at the bottom of rivers. Let's look at what Mozart and Beethoven's scenius was.
From the scenius point of view, Mozart and Beethoven have much in common with each other, and less in common with the Western musical scenes of today, though their music and the values expressed therein still speak to many people through the ages up until today (as of this writing). Still, after I detail some aspects of their lives, we will take a look and see who in recent times (as of this writing) has a similar profile.
Mozart was born into a musical family in Vienna. His father was a highly regarded, well-known composer and music teacher. Mozart and his siblings received their musical training at home. The Mozart children were basically surrounded by music-making and teaching from birth. While Wolfgang's sister was also musically precocious and also groomed for a career in performance as a child, ultimately Nannerl was still just a girl and was subject to the norms of the day, which created the expectation that she would not be the major breadwinner, but a housewife. Here we can already see hints of the answer to the last question at the beginning of this piece. We will never know what heights Nannerl could have risen to.
Although born in Bonn fourteen years after Mozart, Beethoven grew up in a similar situation, as the son of a highly accomplished musician, surrounded by music making and pedagogy from birth. The fourteen years difference in age was enough that Mozart's reputation as a literal wunderkind (though the term came into use at the end of the 1800s) inspired Beethoven's father to attempt to make Beethoven the next Mozart. It did not go so well in terms of the health of the family life and Beethoven's mental health. Eventually, however, Beethoven did go on to study with Haydn in Vienna, make his career there, and become one of the most lauded artists in any art form in modern times.
Both men are known for preternatural musical abilities that add to their aura of unattainable genius, which I would like to demystify. This is the long and circuitous part. Mozart was known for imagining — audiating, in modern music education parlance, which is to hearing what visualizing is to seeing — complete original compositions in his head while out and about and then returning home some time later to write the whole thing down in staff notation. Beethoven is known for being able to compose while deaf. How is this all possible? Who can do this today? Genius! Yes and no. There is no doubt that both were exceptionally skilled musicians; far above average, for sure, far above excellent, even. The how of their abilities, however, is explainable and not beyond your average, trained (whether through academia or self-taught) musician.
Scientists have shown that humans' capacity for language is innate, but that their capacity for reading is not. While there are some people who manage to teach themselves reading and writing at an early age, it is generally viewed as something that needs to be explicitly taught and that many people struggle with it. I would argue that for those who seem to teach themselves, there is work involved and maybe even some explicit instruction, but it is less visible. It's similar to learning to walk — you have people modeling walking, you occasionally have some explicit help, but ultimately you have to do it yourself.
Humans' capacity for music is also innate, but their capacity for reading music is definitely not and most people do not figure out notation for themselves. Now I can hear all of you people who have been persuaded by others that you have zero musical ability whatsoever chiming up, and I think you have internalized a lie. You definitely did not grow up in an environment like the one Mozart and Beethoven did. Neither did I, but my non-musician parents (they did not play instruments, my dad had difficulties matching pitch) were music lovers, so we listened to records as a family, we children listened to music as we played with our toys, we listened to music in the car, we went to every concert in the park, and when the opportunity presented itself to study music privately, my parents made it happen on their limited budget. The primary lesson here is presenting music making as a norm, as a thing that adults do, as something that everyone can participate in on some level is going to go a lot farther toward building musical ability, than avoiding singing to your kid because someone said you have no musical ability, than only ever listening to recordings and never seeing live music. Maybe your parents were like mine and someone still told you to stop singing because it sounds bad. I am sorry. I also think you can make music on a level that is satisfying to you and helps you connect with others, even if you'll never be Mozart or Beethoven. But Mozart and Beethoven lived in environments where music making was a norm and valued.
Returning to the idea that reading music needs to be explicitly taught just as reading language does, I want to emphasize here that Mozart and Beethoven were, even though they were precocious, explicitly taught to read notation. They were also explicitly taught to audiate notation, which is often called "sight-singing" — learning to know what sounds the notation represents. Just as you are reading these alphabet symbols and hearing them in your head as language — which is something you had to learn to do — you can learn to do the same thing with musical notation.2 Yes, even you. Is it easy? Hell, no. It's a lot of work, a lot of rote repetition, a lot of failure. Most people trained in university music programs are learning to do it for the first time at said university music program. Because you don't need this sight-singing skill to even make music successfully — remember, most musicians do not read notation3 — let alone for survival in today's modern world, unlike reading language, learning this skill is much easier if it's something you actually want to do. As a highly-trained classical musician, being able to sight-sing, to transcribe what I hear in my head, to transcribe what my students create is one of my favorite skills. I rely on it all the time. It's one of the best tools in my toolbox as a practicing musician and as a teaching musician. But I had to learn it. I had taught myself a little before I went to college, but I must have taken at least eight semesters of ear-training classes over the years — not because I sucked at it, but because I knew how useful it was going to be, especially because my piano skills are so bad. It was faster and more useful for me to put the time and effort toward ear-training than to piano (which is a large-motor skill issue on my part).
Mozart was able to imagine complete pieces in his head and write them down because he had explicit training in being able to do so. Now, am I imagining complete pieces in great detail? No. No, I am not. That's one of the possible reasons why Mozart is a "genius." But I suspect there have been plenty of other composers with comparable abilities, some of whom might also be geniuses in some sense, but whose music might have been regarded as merely "meh." Similarly, I bet there have been plenty of composers who may not have had the ability to audiate their pieces in such totality, but their works are beloved by many. Let's also keep in mind that not every single thing Mozart composed was totally amazing; much of it is simply competent. That's what happens when you compose to order all the time. That's why people like Handel recycled his own ideas and cribbed others' all the time (copyright was also not a thing yet).
Beethoven was able to compose despite being deaf because he had explicit training in being able to imagine music in his head and write it down on paper before he started losing his hearing. Beethoven could also audiate notation. Instead of having every detail worked out ahead of time and then simply writing it down, Beethoven would write down a short idea and then revise it. And then revise it again. And then revise it again. Beethoven's genius was in editing, a highly underrated skill. When we think of editing, we think of writers, we think of film. In music, we think of Mozart, downloading hi-res music from the heavens and sharing it with us all in his magical, genius way. Beethoven labored extensively over his compositions and we know this because his music notebooks have been preserved for posterity.
When I was a teenager, we had some work being done on our house. One of the workers, upon hearing that I was a budding musician (maybe because I practiced at home almost daily), tried to engage me with his knowledge about music. The only thing I specifically remember from the rather one-sided conversations was that he insisted that Beethoven could compose while deaf because he was using math to compose. I didn't have the arsenal of knowledge that I do now, but this struck me as bizarre right away. Yes, much of music can be explained in a logical, almost mathematical way, which we call "music theory," and most definitely Beethoven was thoroughly schooled in the music theory ideas of his day. But again, coupled with that music theory was ear training, i.e., learning to audiate from notation. He also was an improviser, like most musicians of his day, and successful improvisation depends on successful audiation (independent of notation reading, but often supported by such study), imagining what the musical possibilities are and choosing one of them in real time.
Learning to audiate notation has been a part of professional music training since notation existed. The whole reason Europe developed the notation system that it did was because the pope wanted to standardize the chants across the very large area under his jurisdiction. He didn't want to hear one set of chants in Rome and a different set in Constantinople. Notation was a mnemonic device, first and foremost. But from even before Guido d'Arezzo developed do-re-mi around 1000 C.E. to today, musicians have trained to audiate from notation. I also want to emphasize that the pimply kid in the bedroom trying to learn a guitar solo from a recording by Jimi Hendrix is also ear-training. The one in the hoodie going for that preset in the DAW because they know it's going to be the best thing for the track they are developing has also engaged in some form of ear training and therefore audiation — how else can they be so sure it's going to work? It's not magical, it's work. They have engaged in some sort of work to develop the skills to make the music happen, even if it's fun and doesn't feel like other kinds of work.
Mozart and Beethoven are not geniuses because they can audiate. All musicians learn to audiate in some fashion; some learn to do it at a very advanced level. Mozart and Beethoven are geniuses because of the combination of the quality of craftsmanship and the way they bring together traditional and novel ideas. It's not even because we still value their music today. That, as others have noted before me, says more about our society now, than it does about Mozart and Beethoven.
The traditional ideas are important here: those are the things that create a cultural norm. For Mozart and Beethoven, the traditional ideas would have come from a combination of Central European Folk Music and the Western classical music, including music from the Catholic Church they were raised in (for others, like Bach and his extensive family, it would have been the Lutheran Church). They would have studied this music for their entire childhood, including things like Bach, Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel, Handel, Gluck, and a whole slew of other people who are less known today but would have been standard fare at the time. The folk music included things like "Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman," otherwise known to English speakers as "Twinkle, Twinkle;" other French, Austrian, German, Czech, Moravian, Italian folksongs. Mozart's scenius famously included Antonio Salieri, but also Johann Christian Bach, Josef Mysliveček, and Muzio Clementi. Beethoven's scenius included Anton Rejcha, Johann Hummel, and Luigi Cherubini.
We now have a more complete picture of the world Mozart and Beethoven lived in. A few more things to add: The Industrial Revolution has not happened yet, and therefore Capitalism as we know it today has not happened yet, either. This is the tail end of life-long aristocratic or church support. Beethoven's father was a Kapellmeister; Beethoven was not. Haydn was employed his whole adult life by Count Esterházy. Neither Beethoven nor Mozart had such patronage. The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions had come and gone by 1804; Mozart was dead and Beethoven had written the Heiligenstadt Testament, lamenting his increasing deafness among other things. Today's world is quite different from the one Mozart and Beethoven grew up in. Mozart and Beethoven are barely in different generations.
If we are to go searching for today's Mozart or Beethoven, who are we looking for?
• born in Austria or Germany, perhaps?
• grew up in a musical family?
• with overbearing, ambitious parents eager to make a buck off their kids?
• underwent rigorous professional training from a young age?
• created music that was beloved by a large swath of the public?
• have a reputation, even among people who are not interested in that music? (renown)
I'm not sure we can find someone who ticks all the boxes, but I'm going to make two suggestions. First up, someone born in Vienna, grew up in a musical family, underwent rigorous musical training: Lukas Ligeti. Yes, I know you've never heard of him. He is the son of György Ligeti, whom you've also never heard of, but I assure you he is one of the most important composers of the 20th century, both as an innovator and as a synthesizer. Lukas is less famous than his dad, but is an accomplished musician, with an international career in performance, composition, and education.
Not famous enough, you say. Doesn't qualify. Okay, my next suggestion had overbearing, ambitious parents eager to make a buck off their kids, underwent rigorous professional training from a young age, has created music that was beloved by a large swath of the public, and is renown even among those who are not interested in that kind of music:
Britney Spears.
NO, NO, NO! NO WAY! you say. Her music is not of the level of Mozart's! She doesn't even write it herself! Absolutely not.
Here's the thing. It will never be the same. No one in classical music writes like Mozart anymore and when, say, people like Billy Joel attempt to, they are ridiculed. Why? There's no Billy Joel in that music and there's no Mozart in it. Even though it comes from a place of love and admiration, it's just a loving imitation and is missing the essences of both Billy Joel and Mozart.
Classical music has changed drastically since Beethoven and does not have the cultural cache that it had in the past. And one must wonder what that cultural cache was. Does it only count because it was valued by the aristocratic bourgeoisie? Was it popular among other social classes? Or were they by and large concerned with the upkeep of their own folk musics? The classical music being written today is far from popular and only appeals to a small swath of the listening public. But this doesn't mean that the craftsmanship and creativity isn't there. It does not preclude the existence of geniuses, however unsung they may be.
Mozart isn't alive today, wasn't writing pop music back in his lifetime (and that concept is more of a modern one anyway), and anyone that we could point to who is writing pop music today will never qualify as being Mozart, but not because the craftsmanship and creativity aren't there. The purpose and context of classical music is different than for pop (not that there isn't overlap). The musical results will never be the same. This is a good thing. Prince is Prince, not Mozart. Michael Jackson is Michael Jackson, not Prince, not Beethoven, not Britney Spears. Even Beethoven's dad wanted Ludwig to be the next Wolfgang, and thankfully we got Ludwig and not some pale imitation of Mozart, disconnected from his contemporary life. We need Prince. We need Billie Eilish. We need Jamie Branch. We need Bob Brookmeyer. We need Robert Ashley. We need Laurie Anderson. We need Mozart. We need Beethoven. We need people to be who they are. We need music for contemplation, we need music for worship, we need music for dancing, we need music for theater, we need music for pomp, we need music for circumstance.
But why aren't we asking about the others? Why aren't we looking for Duke Ellington, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Miles Davis, Ravi Shankar, Aretha Franklin? Why is it always Mozart and maybe Beethoven? What are people actually looking for when they ask this question?
The question is rarely, if ever, posed as "who are today's Mozarts?" The question is posed in a way that says we do not have any Mozarts. No one qualifies. The questioner is not interested in the merits of Joni Mitchell or Rhiannon Giddens, Tania León or George Lewis, Gillian Welch or Jeff Tweedy. They already understand that our society is no longer set up to produce Mozarts. The question isn't really about music, it's about how society has changed, and the questioner fears that our best days are behind us.
Our supposed best days are the days of empire, of people knowing their proper place in society. Here are the lines, please color within them, thank you very much. But that world was already starting to fall apart by the time Mozart died. I remind you: the Age of Enlightenment had just finished, and three major revolutions inspired by those shifts in thinking finished shortly after Mozart died. The next major shift was coming up shortly, not to mention the following century which would change the world into something that Mozart and Beethoven would not have been able to foresee or comprehend. Nevertheless, Mozart represents this idea of glory days. Men were geniuses anointed by God, women were home taking care of the kids, black people were slaves, Jews were lending us the money we had strangely decided was an activity forbidden by God but it's okay to participate in as long as someone else is managing it, Roma and indigenous folks and their culture were mostly ignorable, as was the Ottoman empire even though it bordered Europe and trade routes went through it. Poor people were poor and despicable, rich people were rich and laudable. This is also why there are no great women composers. The ones who are alive today can never be Mozart. The ones who were alive in Mozart's time were not allowed to be composers.
We need to stop looking for Mozart and Beethoven and start looking at and listening to who we have right now in front of us, around the world, at all levels of society, not just what the capitalists want us to hear, and certainly not what the algorithm tells us everyone else is listening to. There isn't enough time in the world to hear them all, which is why we want to know who "The Best" are so we don't have to work so hard. Yet the work is worth it and the only way to reap the rewards of attentive listening.
1600-1750 for music — the dates of this period, or any period for that matter, for other art forms are different, music usually being the late bloomer of the arts.
There are people who do not audiate the sounds of language in their minds as they read.
If you need a famous example, Paul McCartney is a pretty textbook example of someone who clearly audiates at a high level, but does not read staff notation.
Loved this essay, Andrea!