When Ideas Die With Their Creators

It is seldom the case that ideas continue to belong to the progenitor. And why would we want them to?

Beethoven might be considered a person whose ideas were epochal, but he was merely following the rule book or 'Best Practices' of composition, built on compositional methods blazed by Mozart and his elders.

After Beethoven died his music endured, and the supporting theories continue to be used to this day. What did die was the classical style. Similarly the ideas behind Apple products may continue to exist in theory, but the new company may be as different as the Beethoven symphonies and the Beatles' Abbey Road, similar in some musicological sense, but vastly different culturally.

Not everyone that liked Beethoven liked the Beatles, even though some of the same compositional devices were used. The core ideas might have been there but were really a different idiom altogether.

If music history is a guide, the core ideas engendered corporeally, will most likely not endure ethereally.

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