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There are well over thousands who have skills beyond Mozart today. The few who become well known are determined by very different things, having skills like Mozart is almost irrelevant. He's also just sort of the token "music talent" example for people who don't listen to music, often goes with the idea "classical music" is when music peaked.
The "gifted piano prodigy" I grew up with is a burnout in his 30s. There's an unassuming data analyst I work with who likely exceeds his skill and just teaches on the side. My local symphony had to cancel this season due to lack of sales. A band at the jazz school my brother attended (BBNG) got sampled by a rapper and were a breakthrough success. This is sorta what it looks like for the Mozarts of today.
Bad Bad Not Good? I remember listening to them on Sound Cloud
Yeah they were all students at Humber, in the Toronto area. Obviously all skilled musicians, but there's a drummer Larnell Lewis who's a student mentor there, my brother was lucky enough to have him, and while lesser known he's a drummer's drummer and insanely skilled. A "Mozart" of drums you could say. While he's successful and tours with Snarky Puppy and the like, it's not like he's a household name or anything. There's so much talent out there.
There’s tons of talent out there and that’s exactly why Mozarts are a thing of the past.
Music is so attainable to people [in the west], and that’s a great thing (not that it shouldn’t be more…I.e greater financing for the arts, especially in public K12). It’s so easy to access, learn, and record.
That, and the media market is so fragmented. We still have pop and chart-toppers in the major genres, sure…but man, there is so much stuff out there.
I don’t think there will be another Mozart. I don’t even think there will be another person we can compare to Michael Jackson, or Freddie Mercury, or Trent Reznor, or Whitney Houston, or any of the other modern legends. Simply because there are so many talented people and media, and the means to produce it, are so attainable.
One of my favorite things to do now is to find the bands “similar to” a band that I listen to or enjoy that have fewer than 1k subscriptions/followers. Even below 500. There’s so, so many hidden gems out there, and some of it may even redefine your own tastes in music.
I'm confused, Mozart is prodigious as a composer, and there are very few names like that.
Naturally when people knowing what they are talking about say that, they don't mean that every modern composer should try and imitate Mozart.
BTW, about modern music - imitating something between Holst, Vaughan-Williams and maybe somebody else has been the mainstream approach to writing movie soundtracks for a few decades already.
Irrelevant - I wouldn't say so. Just the field is wider, so people usually shape their interest in music more variably.
And then you start talking about somebody being a "prodigy" when performing on specific instruments, which is really a different thing.
There are today's composers not widely known and overshadowed by pop music (which could mostly as well be AI-generated, it's all the same) or somebody like Einaudi (who is, sorry, not of Mozart's grade).
Tracker music, generative (not as in LLM-generated) music, various experiments I lack knowledge of music theory to understand and explain, but approve of how they sound and feel.