The thing is that often, at the time, composers with real vision are not so popular.
‘Amadeus’ might be an imagined parallel reality but Salieri really was much more popular than Mozart at the time because he wrote what the mass audience wanted to hear.
I remember hearing music from an C18th composer once with a really big drum sound - annoyingly never remembered the name but no doubt he was largely ignored at the time!
The same is true today with manufactured bands vs those with real vision. We can probably predict that U2 will be revered for their large, varied and accessible oevre but what about bands like The Rolling Stones? Do they really stand out enough from other generic rock to be remembered in 100 years? We don’t know of course - but they stand more chance with music being more readily available than in Purcell’s time.
To some degree, Purcell and other early music is popular because it’s been made more easily available and the cost of producing it is much lower than in the pre digital age.
It’s also not very new - I’ve had a Purcell CD for about 15 years and at attended a Purcell recital about the same time. Before that, who remembers the Benedictine Monks?
Interesting points. I guess there’s probably also a survivor affect? Just a tiny percentage of music from that time was written down or passed on in some other way. So we are choosing from an already much reduced pool, if we want to to listen to something from the 17th century. Maybe there were some absolute blinders worthy of the TriTalk Bangers spotify list but we’ll never know…
I’m sure you probably know that most people in those times heard music from travelling musicians - that was the alternative to their own locally produced folk music.
Vaughn Williams recognised that the folk music was being lost and was one of a number of composers who toured the country collecting tunes before they died out … c1900 IIRC?? No doubt many were lost
Beautiful in itself and painful in the context of the charity this version was released. I’ve sung this as a lullaby to my children for fifteen years now.
I may be a child of Blues, Rock and Metal but there’s beauty in all forms of music