What music of today will be performed in well-attended concerts 200 years from today?

I can’t really imagine any of today’s popular music or even Classic Rock still being performed in 200 years. Just don’t think it has the legs….

People laughed at me 20 years ago when I said that hundreds of years from now it would be Beethoven, Bach and the Beatles but I bet I’m right.

@janbb It is interesting, isn’t it. There is music from the early Baroque period written over 400 years ago that moves modern audiences even to this day. ’‘Capriccio sopra la Spagnoletta’’ by Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583 – 1643) sends chills down my spine. I seriously doubt much of today’s music will endure so well. Why have we failed to progress in music the way we did from 1100 to the late 19th century?

@Judi No doubt the Beatles wrote some fine music. But so did performers in the early 1900s and we rarely revisit their work today

I am with @Judi

I suspect the music you describe will still be listened to as the supreme example of civilized man’s musical skill, taste and expression. We still admire painting and sculpture from centuries ago. There are really no contemporary sculptures and painters that can match even the ancients in sensitivity and technical skill.

Once, artists could only make a living by being patronized by the wealthy. If they were going to make a living at it, they had to be the BEST. That is why we see works by Michaelangelo and Raphael, and not a couple of street vendors.

When art becomes mass media, it increases it’s market, but it does not require pleasing a single discriminating patron. It only has to please the lowest common consumer denominator.

The Beatles are clearly not in the same league as Beethoven. But they certainly are arguably representative of the best that popularized music has provided to date, both in their creativity and their means of distribution of a total product (reasonably priced recordings of original music as a performance and not just sheet music). I wish I had been there.

Anyway, Bach and Beethoven are not going to disappear anytime soon. Neither is Michaelangelo’s Pieta or David.

@josie Amen to that, and you provide a reasonable explanation as well. Thanks.

Thanks for this question! I love getting to post this

Besides Hendrix, you would hear The Beatles, Gershwin, and the Who.

And I would put money on the bet that NO ONE would know who Andrew Lloyd Webber was.

Oh thank you ever so much for that link, @filmfann. What made Hendrix the genius he was that he could get all the depth of emotion that quartet is generating out of one guitar and his voice. I did purple haze to listen to that and grok what it said.

Talking about Woodstock, due to a scheduling problem, Ritchie Havens was asked to stretch out his performance to three hours and he didn’t have 3 hours of material. He improvised Freedom right on the spot, words and all. That was way before rap.

Everything that has the capability to survive for 50 years. So the Beatles and Queen among others will survive for even longer.