When we think about the concept of musical trends we think of our present age since we have a vast media that keeps us up to date with the latest musical trend. Billboard and social media keep us up to date on what the latest trends are, but many famous composers in the past have had to deal with this.

It’s interesting that musical trends apparently existed as far back as the sixteen hundreds. This is when the composer J. S. Bach lived and wrote music and in his day and age the musical public was mad for Italian opera. This is traced in an interesting article on Facebook called Musical Context in Bach’s Era. 

Bach did not follow this trend but wrote his own style of music which was a complex sort of music involving counterpoint which is the play between melodies. He also made reforms in the musical tuning system which paved the way for later composers such as Beethoven and Mozart to create the highly expressive music that they did.

We find at a later time Mozart running into a similar thing when he wanted to write his operas in German as opposed to Italian which was the standard thing of the day. This was represented in the movie Amadeus.

Certainly Beethoven is known for going against the grain by using much shorter melodic ideas and at the same time greatly expanding the musical forms of his day.

A bit later than this we find Schubert still using the shorter forms of the Classical period despite most composers adopting the longer forms.

It’s true that Bach was overlooked during his time and his music awaited a revival by Mendelsohn before generally being recognized for the genius that it is. It’s also true that Schubert never got a thing published during his lifetime and his music sat in a cupboard somewhere in Germany until the songwriting duo Gilbert and Sullivan figured out where it was.

Beethoven once made the remark that his music was for the future and so it makes one wonder how these composers knew that they were on Earth to create something that would last and have an influence that reaches far into the future.