Beatles, 3000
by EIDolan
In class next week, we will explore the mythologizing of Palestrina on Tuesday and the birth of a new genre on Thursday. We’ve already thought about some of the challenges we face with accessing music’s history. As we’ll see, late seventeenth-century attempts to recreate the music of the ancient world produced an entirely new art form: opera. What wild re-imaginings and misconceptions will future generations have about the music of today?
The Thousand-Year Ears 
Oh gosh…. I took me a second to realize that this is a joke/parody! Though I really like the underlying message behind it, how leaving music as a trademark of a certain era can impact future generations in their study of the past… After a good laugh upon watching this video, I reevaluated the overwhelming presence of music in the functioning of human society, that of mankind. On a side note, though the video was not meant to be factual, I do believe the Beatles’ contribution to the huge change in people’s musical tastes is truly remarkable and worthy of attention and discussion.
I thought that this video was funny and entertaining, and it also gives us a great perspective on the difficulty of accurately recreating ancient music without surviving recordings, text, or instruments. Fortunately, I believe that with the invention of recording devices, future generations of humans will be able to enjoy our music as we do. I wonder which artists of the past century will be most widely known hundreds of years from now. The Beatles are certainly a reasonable guess.
This came up at my cousin’s party a few years ago. These are older cousins who were born in the late 70s and early 80s. The oldest said that some of their music would definitely be remembered. He specifically cited U2 as an example of what would last. (The discussion might have been about what we’d listen to when we’re in our 60s.)
I have to think that the most popular bands will be the ones that are the best known in hundreds of years. I also have to think that excellent, less well known bands will also be remembered fine. After all, there is even a mystique about being “underground”.
Agreed that this video is crazy, and really funny, too. On a similar note, it makes me wonder if anything we think of as history is half as false as everything in this video. What if our great historical debates over things like, say, Cleopatra’s race, are as far-off as a debate between whether Paul McKenzie or Scottie Pippin was frontman of The Beatles?
The video describes something very different than the reconstruction of ancient music in the 17th century being what I should blame for opera. As the original post suggests, it is recognized as a mistake that opera was the outcome of that recreation.
What I find amusing is who is regarded as the contemporaries of Lennon and Pippen (and the inclusion of Scottie Pippen in the Beatles). We all know that Michael Jackson wasn’t around at the same time; he was 12 when the Beatles broke up. However, they’re separated by only about 20 years. We just talked about 400 years of music in two lectures, saying that the music was of the time was like what we listened to. I’d hate to think that the 20th century would be regarded as just one period of music. There’s so much diversity, even within the music that I like!
When I started watching this video, I wasn’t sure if I heard right when “Scottie Pippen” was mentioned as a member of the Beatles. As I watched on, I realized this was a parody. It is a funny video with an interesting message. I think, however, that future generations won’t have to worry about having to decipher the history of music like we do when studying music from thousands of years ago. With the onset of the internet, these famous historical figures (e.g. the Beatles) have worldwide reaches and in hundreds of years, I believe that still many people will have evidence of their accomplishments. Plus, it should be documented on the internet in many places too. Simply put, with the internet, I think historical research on the 20th and 21st centuries will be much easier than what we have to do when we study ancient texts to try to understand past cultures and music.
This clip should definitely make us appreciate the variety of tools we have now to preserve modern music. With today’s technology, we don’t have to worry about Scottie Pippen being mistaken as the 4th Beatle in 1000 years time.
Yes, we have many more tools to help try and preserve contemporary music. However, who knows whether future civilizations will be able to find or use any of the vast data out there, whether in C.D., MP3 or other forms. We need certain technologies to process modern music — meaning in my opinion it could be as ephemeral as music of the past.
This was a hilarious parody of some kind of historical documentary (possibly from a future History channel) about the Beatles. At first, I didn’t realize that this video was facetious, but the Scottie Pippen reference completely cracked me up. The video provides an interesting perspective because it gets me thinking “What if the artists and music we are learning about today are as distorted as the Beatles were in the video?” I suppose that we do have documents and scores from the past composers, but I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that we are as inaccurate about past composers as the “historians” were about the Beatles.
I really enjoyed this video for a variety of reasons; not only is it comical, but it also brings up an important point in regards to history in general. Information from the past can easily be misconstrued and exaggerated to the point of invalidity, and because the music we are currently studying from medieval times and the renaissance was not even recorded on paper, let alone audibly, it is very easy to see the potential lack of reliability in what we know about the history of music. Today we learned that many Masses were stamped with Josquin’s name even after his death. Was he the true composer? Questions that we hold today about the past, along with questions the future will hold about music today (including the Beatles), will most likely never have answers that can be known to be certain over thousands of years.
As Daniel Shapiro mentioned today, many composers use old, historic works of music to inspire their future pieces. This idea is concerning if one considers that the inspiration for such pieces may very well be misrepresenting the true music of historic composers. While this concern is valid, I find it adds an interesting element of originality to new pieces. A composer’s work is not a copy of Palestrina if what we believe Palestrina’s music sounded like is false. Additionally, I believe this video demonstrates that while we may have no clue what music in the 13th century was like, we can use the time period’s culture to generalize a consensus about the music at the time. After all, music is about creative expression, not about who invented the “thumbs up” hand sign.
I think this video is really funny, and put together well but I feel like it does bring up a good point. I agree with others who say the internet will decrease the amount of misconceptions of music now, but I also feel like it still left up to an individuals imagination as to how they see things.
Despite the potential distortions there might be in the history, we still love the pieces many composers for their creativity. The thing is we have something remarkable left in the human history to appreciate, regardless of their origins. Those great works inspired us and comforted us. At the same time, I also hope that the modern technology will rule out the mistakes as well as it can in order to preserve the accurate information.
I absolutely adored this video. It took a little while before I comprehended the fact that it was a parody but in my opinion, it contains relevant truths at the core. In essence, can we be absolutely sure that the scribbles of notes on paper are accurate depictions of how music sounded like centuries ago? The answer is a most definite no. Though we have some evidence to back up our findings, we must tread carefully as we try to unravel the workings of the past. We must take everything with a grain of salt. If we don’t, this video instills doubts in us that Palestrina might just have been a pizza maker with Josquin as his waiter.
This video puts into perspective the question of how a great deal of judgment and discretion is involved in studying history with music being a perfect example of this. What if versions of music we listen to from say the Medieval era, are very different from what the composers had originally intended it to sound like? Without recordings and the variability that can arise even from reading sheet music (if there was any) from long ago, there is a huge possibility that what we have concluded about these time period is conflicted. Obviously, there’s no way of knowing for sure how historical music we study today sounded back then and we certainly won’t be able to witness how the music of our day is interpreted in a millennium from now, but it is interesting to keep these thoughts in mind.
I appreciated this video because it uses humor to highlight the constant struggle music historians face when trying to characterize music from many centuries ago. It modernizes the struggle that 17th century thinkers had when trying to recreate ancient Greek and Roman music and makes these difficulties more applicable to our own lives. I think that it raises some excellent questions about the inaccuracies of reproducing unrecorded music. How do we know if what we are recreating is correct? Is there any way to double-check our sources? 17th century thinkers were faced with this constant struggle because they were trying to recreate music based on limited, non-audio, sources. Thus, they had to partially imagine what kinds of music the Greeks and Romans were playing. On the other hand, the majority of today’s music can be (and is) recorded. I certainly hope that future generations will have a better idea of what our music sounded like because they will, most likely, have direct access to both audio and visual recordings of how we produce and listen to music.
This video sums up a lot of ideas I’ve been having about musical history so far. I don’t think it is too far of a stretch. The idea of facts being lost over the course of a thousand years is likely, especially when music is not properly recorded in a format that is understandable to future generations.
It helps that today we have the internet and mp3 files as a means of preserving music. Who knows whether this will be lost over the course of a thousand years? Only time will tell. I mean, is anyone going to preserve old formats like VHS tapes?
This is absolutely right. I remember reading a novel which tells a story of human beings in several hundred years when outer space creatures finally found earth and decided to invade us. We have no chance winning the war so we decided to find a way to store everything that can represent our civilization, just in case some other civilizations might find them and know that human existed once. The problem, they realized then, is not “what” to store, but “how”. All those advanced electronic devices they have to store information can only last, if not less than, thousand years, which is such a short period compared to our universe’s that it’s unlikely for any other creatures to find them. The only solution that our future scientists come up with, at last, is to carve words on rocks, which can last millions of years.
Hence, to answer your question, I think the most efficient way to preserve our music is to write them down on rocks!
This is why I think it’s extremely incredible for us to talk about those music developed before recording and even printing were available. To be able to reproduce medieval music, one would have to conduct extensive research into historic documents, tracing reality among anecdotes and even to use his own imagination to fill up the gap lost inevitably in hundreds of years.
This video is funny, but it raises an interesting question that people are constantly debating: what music will be remembered in the future? Furthermore, it makes you wonder how that music will be remembered. What makes this video even more intriguing is that it pretends to look forward 1,000 years instead of just 20 or 30. It forces you to really consider artists of the recent past from a broader perspective and it makes me appreciate just how powerful music can be in society. It really is incredible that we are still listening to pieces composed hundreds of years ago. Finally, I definitely see today’s technology playing into the preservation of more recent musical creations.
Like many others have commented already, this parody leads me to ponder how inaccurate we could be about our own conception of music history. But it also supports my belief that having a collective story of our past is enough for us to appreciate it, no matter how untrue that story could be. What matters is that we believe that events had happened roughly the way we imagine them to have happened.
The video is quite out there. It’s hard for me to believe that our reconstructions of music a thousand years ago could even come close to the level of absurdity in the parody.
It raises a legitimate point that our reconstruction of history could be shockingly inaccurate or prone to strong biases. However, I think modern record keeping has improved to the point where most human knowledge will be accurately preserved from here on out (short of a truly disturbing catastrophe).
This parody is hilarious! I agree with the points that my classmates have made about how information from the past can be exaggerated or misrepresented. This video has such a professional appearance that it is difficult to realize at first that it is a parody. After watching this video, I have realized that the history of music is definitely subject to each person’s own perspective and interpretation.
After reading the comments above, I was interested to see that so many people view the Internet as a continually growing “timeline” of music. The lack of fact-checking that stems from a generation reliant on the Internet would inherently create confusion in this timeline. A few people also mentioned the idea of misrepresentation of former composers that existed in the 13th century. I think it is just as easy, if not easier to misattribute music now than it was then. For example, the past few years have been accompanied by a rise in the popularity of Electronic Dance Music, in which many DJs popularize a once barely known or unknown song. Though some music fans chart the source of the original music, it is more likely to be popularized in someone else’s name.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching this video. Loving both humor and the Beatles it was a great to see a combination of the two. This paradoy and the comments of my peers in the class just have reinforced my opinion that history, musical included, is a very subjective thing.
I throughly enjoyed the humor in this video. At first I was really confessed about why they were saying the Beatles have been around for thousands of years but then I realized this was a parody. This video is able to remind us that music can truly be interrupted anyway one wishes and that music can be remembered in a variety of ways.
Oh gosh, as a big time Beatles fan I found this video both entertaining and disturbing. My hope is that with the technology we have now, the music of the last couple generations will not be lost. I hope that future generations only study and build off of the music of the past, rather than retroactively distort it. That being said, we may never be able to hear the music of the 16th, 17th or 18th century in the clarity and form we should. I think that is something we must recognize, rather than blindly attempt to fill in the gaps.
I think this was pretty interesting to think about how people 1000 years later will think about our music. With our technology today, especially with so many books and online websites to preserve them, the history of musicians will definitely survive. It’s also interesting because just like how we study opera and beethoven, the people in 1000 years will study the music we listen to today. We will become another era in music.
I agree with your statements about the future longevity of music due to increased documentation/preservation. I wonder what music genre we will be remembered for? Or will we be sort of the start of a multi-genre era?