What If the Future Happened In the Past?

 

'What-Ifs' are always fun to use as a creative tool. They are essentially thought experiments for creative people. (Charlie Brooker, the writer of Black Mirror is a great 'what-iffer').

If film existed in the 17th century, which composers would have gotten the film score gigs up through the Classical period?

I posed this what-if on a forum and the results were somewhat predictable: composers would have seen it as a natural extension of theater and opera. (e.g. Beethoven's Egmont Overture).

There is a logical progression built into history, and technology always disrupts it by slowing things down or speeding things up, and in the case of film and sound recording, capable of doing both, and in random order.

Film in the 18th century would have been a major disrupter of history, as composers might have been seeking fame and social status instead of art for art's sake, and would have shaped music accordingly. (Arguably, MTV dumbed-down music through the focus on celebrity). Beethoven probably would have not had an interested in film (unless there was some philosophical element), whereas Haydn would have seen it as a vehicle to market performances of his work. Haydn would have had a Twitter account; Beethoven perhaps would have not even had a cell phone, if that technology existed.

Technologies tend to choose their actors, and the actors shape the art accordingly.

Ideas for inventions are always occurring, as the creative process is naturally divergent. The seeds of innovative breakthroughs are usually noticed, but have no practical use in a particular time period, or are released in a provisional state, perhaps foreshadowing the future, as the Zoetrope, originally marketed as a toy, was an incremental manifestation for what was to become Film. Leonardo da Vinci made plans for a helicopter in the 15th century. but it took five-hundred years for lots of other technologies to be invented.

In music, the tritone in the baroque and classical periods was always an interval that required a resolution to a more stable chord. But pianists must have found it and used it on its own as a standalone sonority, and it wasn't until be-bop (the 1950s) heavy metal (~1970) that it was used as a riff. And for that matter, what if there were 'riffs' or 'licks' as we understand them now, had existed during the classical period? Jimi Hendrix established that sound that is now eponymously known. Composers might have used it as a leitmotif for an evil character or specter in an opera, but by 1968, or by the time Hendrix released Foxy Lady, society would have inculcated (reinvented) it as the sound of the time.

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Some of the responses/comments as to what composers would have gotten film gigs:

• Rossini
• Telleman
• Mendelsohn
• Berlioz
• Louis XIV would have been a director
• Debussy would have composed for indie dramas
• Schoenberg and Berg for 'horror films' of those times. (Serial music might have already been influenced by film as we know it, through non-linear editing, and the totality of modernity at that time, as it evolved through World Wars and other historical inflection points. Apparently, Schoenberg coined the term Tonmeister in 1946, who by virtue of this thought experiment, would have been pushed back to 1846. (Joe Miller)

If Bernard Herrmann lived during the baroque he would have been curious as to why he was so drawn to film. We are always getting glimpses of the future right in front of us, but it is a mirage, as the world awaits other inventions and breakthroughs, and for people to act on them.

1/3/2018

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[1/3/2025: After watching the Morricone documentary I realized that it’s new technologies that make new forms possible–a simple variation on McLuhan’s famous maxim. AI is making things possible, but we don’t know which artists will catch the big fish. In any event, the patterns will be the same, i.e. an artist does the new thing, becomes famous for it, then has an identity crisis. Morricone never really wanted to be known as just the Spaghetti Western composer. "When I score a film I am a composer. When I write for myself, I am someone else. So I become a very diverse and opposite composer--it feels like I have a double face".]