I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.
Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?
In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.
Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think–to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I’d assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I’d also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.
Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I’m less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they’d react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
orchestral performance of Undertale
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The first thing that pops into my mind is Bioshock: Infinite’s Albert Fink and his Magical Melodies. If you haven’t played the game before, Fink uses portals that are rips into the future to hear modern music and then recreates it with period appropriate instruments and vocals, which is set in 1912. Hearing “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” coming from and Organ Grinder booth and “God Only Knows” by a barbershop quartet (just to name a few) was a highlight for me, so I can only imagine what something would be like with your suggestion.
The temptation would be to play “Raining Blood” and get extremely excommunicated. “South of Heaven” you could argue is a musical Hieronymus Bosch painting. “Disciple,” less so. For apostasy that cheeky locals could reproduce on a lute, do “The God That Failed.”
Probably the least riot-inducing song that’d still leave the aristocracy struggling to deal with the experience is Anamanaguchi’s “Endless Fantasy.” To people intimately familiar with wind and string instruments, and for a song that Jackson Parodi managed to decently reproduce on a goddamn accordion, it’s juuust enough to leave everyone wondering how the hell humans made those noises. It’s also obscenely energetic. Nevermind concert halls, play this at cafe that’s just imported tobacco and watch some men in hosiery get off their asses. All of that goes double for “Prom Night.” None of these people have ever heard a square wave.
Somewhere in-between, I’d suggest any Flaming Lips album. At War With The Mystics might go over quite well, at first.
