"Pastime Paradise"/"Gangsta’s Paradise"/”Amish Paradise"

@uncalled4 Right because McCartney is vegetarian. LAME.

@CountScrofula That was my understanding, yes.

@bijouxbroussard I can imagine that most of the music that has been popular over the last 20 years will not be around in another 20.

@ReneeT Same here. For every artist whose music is being "sampled" 50-70 years later, there are so many others who were only popular back then. And I strongly suspect those doing the sampling of original music will have [b]their[/b] 15 minutes and then vanish, as well.

@bijouxbroussard I think "sampling" - mixing random quotes and synthetic rhythm tracks to create purely-ephemeral material - is cheating, by people unable to create anything original for themselves, and usually ignores credits and royalties to the original composers and performers.

Covers, though, are a different matter and provided it respects the work is the best way to keep music alive long after its first appearance - even centuries after its composers' lives.


Kept alive in unexpected ways sometimes. Many of us will have heard various orchestral or brass-band arrangements of Beatles or Kinks melodies, but I switched on my radio one day just inside a "classical" string quartet piece. After a few bars, I thought the tune sounded like Led Zeppelin's [i]Stairway To Heaven,[/i] and that, "Oh, so that's where Page & Co. found the melody!" Then the cadenza started. Eh? That does not sound like Haydn or Mozart, nor even a Romantic-era piece! It was indeed Led Zeppelin's [i]Stairway To Heaven,[/i] the presenter afterwards telling us the chamber-music quartet (sorry, I forget its name) having recorded a note-by-note transcription to violins, guitar solo and all, as a 70th Birthday present to Jimmy Page!


Yet I think it's always been the case that only some music survives. For all that is still known from Mediaeval to present time there must be a lot that has gone for ever. A lot of that perhaps did deserve to sink without trace, but with it must have been much still worth playing.

Very occasionally something pops up as a fading manuscript found in some attic or museum, and enjoys a new life! Or a composer who never made the Big Time in his her own era, becomes recognised by later generations.