Yeah, so I'm going to start by highlighting what I've said because about half your post is just reiterating my argument without you realizing you're reinforcing my stance:
OhayoKD wrote:AdagioPace wrote:70sFan wrote:And then there is volume. Like any modern fictional icon, the work was played and built off so often and so frequently that eventually something larger emerged from the sum of its parts. Not only does Bach come into mind when his own work played, but he's also thought of in the works of thousands of others.
The other half is you effectively conceding the music itself isn't era-transportable:
Today we have thousands of people able to understand, reproduce and imitate what mozart did but it ends right there. No classical musician nowadays, even the most innovative, is dethroning Mozart in the smallest concert hall close to where you live
TLDR: Mozart's music isn't remarkable beyond external context, like...when it was released.
The first mistake you do is trying to give Mozart and Bach's music a quantitative objective characterization (by complexity,or by other criteria)
Uh...yeah, that's not a mistake. That's a necessary step if you want to make a claim(or in your case, counter my claim) about how a text holds up in a vacuum. If you're not interested in explaining what about the music itself is eliciting a personal or societal/cultural response, then you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. Your critique of modern classical music was "i find it boring". But if you can't articulate what shortcoming in the text is producing that boredom, then you have nothing to base your assumptions regarding "era-transportability" off. Perhaps that's why you started the same post conceding Mozart's music is in fact,
not era-transportable. But whatever, let's start with some fundamentals.
Music(and all "Art over time/narratives") takes some base and then complicates it. And the coherence of the patterns of complication weighed along with the degree of complication are the primary predictors of perception(and consequently why tools explored in music theory are constantly framed in a narrative lens). Why? Because generally, whatever someone is looking for(escape, meaning, empathy?), it's going to be more potent when it feels "real"(immersion). Reality is seemingly infinitely complex and somehow perfectly coherent. Thus, people
generally go for "depth", a product of the number of webs/relationships/and interacting details present in a framework(or a world). But they also want the connections to follow an(at least generally) internally consistent framework, so as not to "break" immersion.
Counterpoint complicates a musical line by placing a second musical line alongside where the relationships between corresponding notes are dictated by frameworks which each contain a bunch of different rules that should generally be adhered to.
Sonata form starts with a base(typically set in a tonic key) and then proceeds to arc(dominant -> tonic(for posterity start with c -> g -> c and you can then move those fingers across the piano(mind the blacknotes!) to mantain the relationship)). before synthesizing for a resolution(which often functions as a set-up for another piece, a proto-album more or less)
And then we have the much maligned "verse-chorus" form, which lay-people describe as a simple low-common denominator format to compel the less sophisticated denizens of 2023 even though it actually is a more complex structure than anything mentioned before. This ensures a base-level of "depth" for a sandbox which, when used well, can produce work no one of mozart or beethoven or bach's time could have dreamed of:
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Keys, chords, blah blah blah, let's talk
dynamics. If I can direct your attention to the second verse(1:30), introspective backstory, voice quiets down, percussion simplifies(negative space!!!), and then as the backstory ends, volume ramps up, pitch goes up(towards what we see in the chorus). The verse starts in half-time(you "slow things" by lessening the frequency of instrumentation) and then reverts when we shift from plot to character pay-off. Pay mind to the details. The shift from half-time is set-up with the snap in the downbeat being joined by another, stronger bit of percussion ramping up the frequency. THEN everything escalates, before resolving in the chorus as our character moves from the doldrums of orphan-hood to the satisfaction of not being utterly alone with the imaginary friends his "brilliance" constructed half-way through verse 1.
Let's move to our post-chorus(3:17). Following a pre-chorus with Goshino singing in the same octave as he did for first two iterations of the chorus with diminished orchestration and a slower pace, the climax literally bleeds over into a novel "movement" where the lyrics finally shift from a description of the present to a desired future. This is what "I wanted to talk with you about" was referencing. A lyrical set-up with a payoff that only manifests after countless distinct micro-arcs coalesce into a major one with surgical precision. The vocalization/percussion alone would be "alien" for the renaissance, never mind the lyrical excution(for reference, the operas of the time shifted between a rigid binary of just expositing plot and then just expositing what one felt). Never mind how it elevates when it interacts with a similarly excellent visual companion to create something richer:
https://youtu.be/OoJBMjjIXY4?t=4This is today's bar to be celebrated as special as opposed to a vacuous flash in the pan. The lack of comparable influence isn't because of "goodness", it's because Goshino is competing with this:
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and this:
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and this:
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and this:
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And this:
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It isn't a bunch of white people trying to appease a few rich and powerful elites anymore. The "talent-pool" has expanded by a degree the nba could not dream off. The world now has all the tools and exponentially more people now have access to the discoveries/knowledge that these century-old predecessors were just about hitting the surface off. The idea that Steph Curry helping increase the volume of shots where 2 points becomes 3 points compares to what we've seen in music is crazy.
20 years ago, John Williams created "maybe the greatest soundtrack ever" by simply matching movement and adding stylistic flourishes informed by narrative tone. In the last 3 years, Hilda, Andor, EAOO, Arcane, SS, have all went miles beyond, with sound coloring character, plot relationships, and worlds before then splashing the colors together to create a web far more intricate than the glorified window dressing of yesteryear's classics.
Even if we restrict our discussion to the kiddie-pool of Western classical, the expansion of tones and the use of "cents" represents a bigger shift than the introduction of the-shot clock. The fundamental grammar of music has shifted multiple times over, and you're talking about 3-pointers.
No friend, there are many many mozarts today, taking a diversity of approaches and applying what they've taken away from a virtually endless fountain of knowledge. Imagine Charles Barkley ranting about jump-shooters x 100. That's you.
And no, actually, much of it
is driven by science, the very physics of sound. Even the first level of music theory covers the scientific mechanics. And here's where we get to the crux of the matter:
You still study Mozart, you don't get to study Mikan (unless you like his style and it's your favourite player but we're in the personal preference sphere, not in the academical one here).
You may study Mozart in a musical
history class, but he is barely mentioned in theory. He was mentioned
zero times in composition where one analyzes, engraves and learns how to emulate a plethora of different styles, musical languages, and the specific applications, ranges, and variants of every instrument of the west as well as many, many others to the means of learning how to notate and compose for everything. Why? Because when the goal is to learn how to create and notate(especially the creation and notation of that which is originaL), these white giants from the period of history where westerners pretend everything began have little functional utility.
Mozart is great if you want to understand the history of music, but he doesn't offer anything novel or unique for one trying augment one's own craft, because everything he's done has already been done endlessly and whatever foundations he established have already been transformed into skyscrapers by various similarly capable musicians during the ensuing centuries.
As you've admitted, his relevance has little to do with the music itself, but rather the cultural context surrounding it. And beyond the objective of trying to idolize the past, I don't see the point of pretending otherwise
).
First let me say that I appreciate your positive inquisitive attitude, while trying to understand how things work in the world by drawing comparisons. In this specific discussion though I'm not really persuaded by your answer, especially by your methodology. The first mistake you do is trying to give Mozart and Bach's music a quantitative objective characterization (by complexity,or by other criteria) in order to force rankings and trying to make comparisons between fields possible. It's an alarm warning for me. I would never talk about "x degree of complexity, x space of separation etc.." or "threshold" in music. A no-go line for me is trying to apply alien critical frameworks to complex, unique historical-cultural interactions which allowed some extraordinary music to emerge only in a specific timeframe in history of mankind (mostly german-austrian classical music). The same applies to italian Reinassance for example. 
