Inspired by a post that popped on lemmy world today about Weird Al it got me thinking. I listed out a bunch of names but the one that I think fits the most would probably be Surfan Stevens. Who do you all think?

  • BOMBS@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    ITT: people who have severely underestimated Mozart’s musical capacities and contributions.

    Mozart is a musician that is studied by nearly any professional musician. There are historians, musical scholars, and museums dedicated to him. He’s a household name across the world. He established a period of music. As a teenager, he deciphered a 12 min choral piece with multiple groups and solos after hearing it once and by memory wrote it down later that night (he heard it a 2nd time a few days later for minor corrections). When he presented the score to the clergy, they said he got one note wrong. After investigation, Mozart heard it right. The musician’s score was off by a note. Could any popular musician mentioned here decipher just a 6 min song of 4 instrument band after hearing it once with pen and paper ready? Imagine telling any music legend now, “Hey, you’re off by a half a step on the 3rd note of bar 28 of your own song.”

    Comparing an awesome popular singer, guitarist, or band to him is like comparing your friend that got a job at NASA to Einstein. There is no modern Mozart. There have been greats since Mozart, but there haven’t been any Mozarts since Mozart. I say this as a Beethoven fan. Mozart was the only Mozart. He was so good, that his name became a title for great musician: Mozart. No one listed in this thread is anywhere near being a Mozart.

    • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      When you put it that way, the list of candidates thins out and the one figure I see still standing is John Coltrane, who in his day was running circles around fellow jazz musicians, they couldn’t wrap their heads around how Coltrane’s chord progressions and jumping between keys from note to note made any sense… yet it did, and beautifully.

      EDIT: typo

    • CthuluVoIP@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Likely the closest I could picture in a modern sense is Jacob Collier, who can indeed perform these types of musical feats. But the crux of the issue is that while Collier is much loved, he isn’t a dominant force of popular music like Mozart was.

    • jbk@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      What if some or most of those details were made up to sound nicer / more impressive?

      • myfavouritename@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Yeah, that’s exactly my first thought while reading this. If I rewrote the list of achievements above to sound like I was claiming they all happened to me, and then posted it to twitter, it would be indistinguishable from most other “🙄 that happened” posts.

        People will be saying similar stuff about Taylor Swift in 100 years; by definition being legendary means being unreal.