I think that classical music does itself a disservice in its obsession to preserve the norms of centuries long gone. We shouldn’t expect everyone to experience musical transcendence exclusively on the terms of contemporaries of Napoleon. Most of these composers were bourgeois men navigating a world characterized by radically different norms and customs. Douglas Adams said that Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human, but I’d counter than Mozart tells you a lot more about what it’s like to be, say, Galen Weston than an Indigenous janitor at Loblaws. It forces humanity to be explored through a very narrow prism.

Given that I fell in love with music listening to the music of dead people, if Aliens were to destroy all old music and use the neuralizer from Men in Black to wipe it from our collective memory, it would also wipe out a large part of my personality. It might be that I would just stop caring about music and move on to doing other things.

Even if I decided that I wanted to stick with music, I don’t know if I would want to keep playing violin. With most of its standard repertoire obliterated, my instrument would have lost its sense of timelessness. It would appear as an instrument like any other. It is likely that far fewer parents would be keen to pay me to teach their children how to play, given its diminished prestige. I might abandon the violin gravitate instead towards learning piano, bass, or how to use digital audio workstations.

If I were to continue studying violin, it would be with a different objective. I would be far less concerned with channeling the spirit of a bygone era. The “cult of the written score” would be severely weakened. The unique separation that classical music imposes between “composer” and “interpreter” could easily vanish. It might seem obvious that I should be giving concerts primarily of original material. Since most extant music would have a companion video, be it a music video or a recorded live show, I would think it natural to give all my music a visual component.

My playing style would likely change, as well. I would be less concerned with finding the big, fat tone of a romantic concerto. The composers whose music I would be playing would demand a more physical and varied style. “Extended techniques” would simply be “techniques”, standard G-D-A-E tuning might be less of a given assumption, and learning to play electric violin might be just as important as knowing how to play “unplugged.” The violin, an instrument that has hardly evolved since the 19th century, might be completely redesigned. An example of the kind of repertoire I’d be thrilled to spend time with is Suzanne Farrin’s Time is Cage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdZ4YgyZLqQ. Freed from most of the “genre” labels of the past, I could instead focus on arranging tones and colours however I saw fit.

I have two thoughts reading the Nietsche quote. The first is about the importance of keeping received wisdom in perspective; the norms of music are contingent, and they vary with time. If you accept them as immutable, you let the past narrow your artistic horizons. Second, I learned from doing a BA in History that if you’re not careful, History can prove anything you want to believe. People have studied the History of Rome and determined that it fell because of taxes, inequality, homosexuality Christianity, or whatever factor confirmed their prior beliefs. Divining what is “worth knowing and preserving in the past” is indeed as difficult as Nietsche describes. Third, it’s that I believe playing and listening to the music of the past can be an excellent way of stepping outside of the present moment. This cuts against Nietsche’s quote, because in so doing we shed our ego and submit ourselves to the past. This is why I am so fascinated by Early Music Concerts that accompany music of the Enlightenment, Renaissance or Middle Ages with audiovisual presentations exploring scientific or cultural developments of the time.