Eli5: if we are able to recreate modern music (disco, pop, rap) and songs with classical instruments how come people didn’t make those beats or similar songs back in classical times?
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We can’t typically answer why people didn’t do a certain thing definitively. We can just say that the historical processes that lead to those styles of music being created hadn’t occurred yet.
But it’s a bit like asking why different styles of poetry were popular throughout the world at different times. There’s no technological limitation that prevented Shakespeare from busting out a haiku in perfect Japanese. And you can even write haikus in English. So, why didn’t he write any haikus? Well, I hope the answer to that is obvious – he had no exposure to that particular genre and, inventive as he was, was probably incapable of inventing it only with the inspiration of the poetic forms and genres he had been exposed to
just look at the history of rock n roll. anytime people change music, the older generation calls it an abomination. Even relativly minor changes.
you cant jump streight from classical music to pop without causing rioting. you have to take it step by step over time, and that takes time not technology.
I think it also depends on taste, so to speak. What is good, etc.
Even with in the then-era, a perfect example is of Vivaidi:
>[after leaving Venice] Like many composers of the time, Vivaldi faced financial difficulties in his later years. His compositions were no longer held in such high esteem as they once had been in Venice; changing musical tastes quickly made them outmoded.
Of course, many of the works of Vivaidi is extremely suitable metal nowadays, with some distortion.
Furthermore, traditionally music have concept of what is dissosance and what is not. Blues scale, by traditional music theory, is dissoance (to my knowledge). That in addition to othering of culture. Misirlou will likely not join popular guitar lexicon if not due to more open minded taste, but instead stuck as an oriental music.
Then there’s the timbre. Many modern guitar-oriented music comes about due to the use of distortion, which is traditionally seen as a bad thing. If you compare the timbre, you will also notice that modern day music leans toward more low frequency music, which more or less correspond to Cello’s range; yet what they consider good is Violin’s range.
I have no idea if it’s the case, but it’s certainly possible that there were some musicians back then farting around with different beats or whatever and came up with some things that would sound fairly modern to us. But since there wasn’t any recording back then and actually writing music down was a labor intensive practice, it might make sense that very little of those ‘jam sessions’ output was ever put onto paper because maybe there wasn’t a market for it back then.
Much of the stuff that survived from those times was likely preserved because it was popular back then and so it was considered worth the expense to put it on paper and make copies of it. People couldn’t just upload random tracks to soundcloud or whatever in the 1800s. There’s probably a ton of interesting music lost to time.
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