What If Mozart Played Blues?

 

 

Composers must have discovered blue notes by accident, but dismissed them as dissonant or wrong. Major 7th chords were dissonant in the sense that the 7th degree resolved to the tonic. 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 and heavy metal that it was used as a riff. What if there were 'riffs' or 'licks' as we understand them now, had existed during the classical period? Jimi Hendrix established that sound with the now eponymous "Hendrix Chord". 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 Purple Haze, society would have inculcated (reinvented) it as the sound of the time.

Mozart probably heard blues, but quickly rejected it. I would presume that in other parts of the world at that time young musicians were playing on lutes in "pubs" and finding that sound.