Would Da Vinci Use Maya?

To me the question is undoubtedly, just as the question of whether JS Bach or Mozart would have picked a Fender Stratocaster over a Harpsichord or Piano Forte if they had been born when I did.

Which is not to say that I'm a Leonardo Da Vinci because I can use photoshop. It is to say that he would probably be winning competitions on a site like CGTalk or creating bill boards for Nike, ads for HP etc.



The above clip, mayhaps makes the point I'm trying to make, it was supposed to be some social experiment to see whether people would notice that the shitty busker is actually one of the US's 'leading musicians' and to see if people would notice during rush hour and enjoy the free show.

This clip was posted on a friends facebook feed some time ago, and I thought of it while looking at the Dali exhibit today, and more to the point I thought of our mutual friends verdict:

Well, also it's not popular music. Who the hell can appreciate violin solos? If it was TI singing autotune in the subway you can be sure a massive crowd would be gathered round.

The real story here - unknown man plays unpopular music really well; nobody cares.

And it's true, but it's also the difference I feel between classical musicians today and popular musicians then (JS Bach, Mozart). Did you know for example that you weren't considered 'worth your salt' if you couldn't improv back in the romantic a classical music periods.

JS Bach is probably the most overlooked soloist of all time, known for driving whole congregations out of cathedrals with his 40 minute harpsichord solos. Someone with such musical genius born in the 70's and a teen in the 80s would have taken a look at the rigourous and dogmatic automatons that make up the classical world of music and the 80's overplaying of ZZ top, Kirk Hammett, Mr Big and Slash and said 'I'm getting me a guitar'.

If JS Bach was alive and at the forefront of popular music today I imagine he would be Tom Morello.

Yes, the appeal of classical music is destroyed by the very people taught to preserve it, by creating to my sensibilities an unpleasant shrine to the past.

Where Dali though, learnt and conversed with the Renaissance masters, I wonder why the visual arts embrace change and have a healthy relationship with the past, where the musical arts (particularly orchestral music) rejected modernism and became unhealthily obsessed with the past?