Why don't they compose music like Bach any more?

Two reasons:

1. Really good composers don't want to compose more old music. They want to do something else. Merely good composers can't compete with Bach.

2. It's not about the 'objective' value of the music that matters. Bach is a huge brand. The music itself is not enough. It must be composed by Bach, music like Bach is not enough.

I made the counterargument for 2 "Only the music matters, not who or how it is made. Anything else is just posturing." and just as I thought, almost everyone disagrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670072#40670172

An answer to somebody asking the title's question would be:

They do compose new baroque and romantic era style classical music all the time.

Do you go their concerts or listen to their records? If not, then it's not so much that they don't, as that people don't give them sales, success, and exposure, so you'd know about them. And apparently you didn't even bother to Google about such artists, so...

I got endless streams of synthwave, vaporwave and similar on Youtube, regularly hearing new songs as well, people still keep creating great new music.

Why'd we have to compose music in a style of the past? We got different instruments and sound production methods at our disposal now.

Bach clearly was a geek of his time though, and I respect that.

Because we already have Bach? It would be stupid to be just a copycat of someone, that's why every famous artist in history at one point got fed up from copying the past's masters and finally did their own thing achieving greatness.

Howard Goodall has a great analysis[0] of how classical music was dying in the 1950s and 1960s until The Beatles indirectly saved it. It had taken a shift to avant-garde and strongly experimental sounds until The Beatles' influence reminded composers that good composition following the fundamentals could produce great music. I'm not tuned in enough today to know if that still holds true, but it was an interesting analysis. He does a much better job of explaining it than I did.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQS91wVdvYc

Prokofiev's Op. 25 is not intended to have been a period-accurate pastiche. The "classical" title is meant to indicate a tongue-in-cheek theme, as in a costume party. And to answer the OP question, the social context in which compositions in the past were written no longer exists. From the vantage point of the present, a composition which is restricted to the vocabulary and the techniques of a single past era seems to be arbitrarily excluding possibilities which have since become known to all of us.

Because we don't listen to music the same way we listened in Bach's time.

The Italian movie director Frederico Fellini hated television because it destroyed the ceremony of movie theatres. He complained that before television watching movies was a ritual. People would program it in advance, invite friends, dress sharply, take hours to go downtown (no multiplexes back then) and discuss the movie at length with others. That's how you'd get dense movies like the ones from John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean.

When television came it banalized the experience. As Fellini said, people would watch movies in pyjamas while the dog was barking outside spoiling it all. True, after some time, television learned how to make solid drama (Sopranos, The Wire, etc). But that was just a glimpse, streaming will erase that.

Similarly, in Bach's time, music was rare and, because of that, meant to be transcendental, to be extraordinary and to be played in extraordinary gothic cathedrals, audiences expected it that way. And, btw, Bach-like music was extremely rare during baroque times. Apart from a few Italian and French composers, no one in the Baroque era did anything really remarkable.

Today, music is played on Spotify. It is cheap and discardable. Can't be Bach, will never be.

Edit: remember, the shift from Bach's standards began during his late years (1750). He was considered old-fashioned and his sons (Carl Philip Emanuel and Johan Christian) began composing in a style different from his father's. 3 crucial elements to understanding this change were the rise of a bourgeois class demanding entertainment, the growing market for concert halls and the industry of music publishing for private entertainment. This lead to the production of music more "accessible", simpler and easier to play. Mozart and Haydn were the new masters.

There is a point of view that all the western music is divided by Bach. The before era when music is mostly based on intuition and imitation, and the after era when music is strongly based on elementary theory. Bach himself, interestingly, belongs to the "before" era and as such is a pinnacle of intuitive pre-elementary music.

Just yesterday I found an album of Elizabethian remakes of Nick Drake's songs mixed with John Dowland's. The difference in composition is staggering. And Nick Drake was not a typical songwriter himself. Yet a 50 years old song is principally different from a 500 years old even when played by the same people on the same instruments.

As a person with a music degree, albeit not in composition, but I had several friends who were composition majors, my impression is that composers often do write music in old baroque or classical styles etc., which are academically well understood, but they do it more as an exercise. Probably some composers even do compose exclusively in those styles. But the point is we don't know it because there isn't much interest from general audiences in anachronistic music and of course there isn't much commercial interest either.

Bach of course produced a lot of music that came down to us, but he was paid to do it as a court and church composer. He had to have something new ready to play every day in the styles that were popular at the time. That was his job. And he improvised much of it and then wrote it down and developed it later, which was very common at the time (and even now).

Because there’s no money or prestige in it. There are plenty of people who understand the craft and could do it. It’s easy enough to imagine some cultural moment - say a popular romance set in the era - bringing it back for a season of baroque hype.

We've moved on, we've got Arvo Pärt [1], Steve Reich [2], Wim Mertens [3], and Almost Vinyl [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Reich

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Mertens

[4] https://www.youtube.com/@AlmostVinyl/videos

The real reason is because we tune instruments differently. Anything about "why would you want to be a copy cat of Bach?" is just non-sense - musicians have been copy-catting each other endlessly since music existed, and still do today.

The writing technique of the baroque era revolved around line conductions that dodged harsh-sounding intervals in the temperament of the time.

Nowadays, we tune using equal temperament. Equal temperament doesn't have harsh-sounding intervals (except flat 9th on a major chord), which makes classical writing technique obsolete.

The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse / Rick Beato: https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo

This might provide part of the answer.

I don't know about Bach. However, one thing that strikes me is that the easiness of producing something of high quality probably means that it's just high enough to seem so for most people and not really as high as the things that were considered high.

Rick Beato had an interesting video on this phenomenon. I'm not very musically literate but I found the general idea quite insightful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo

I'd suggest the obvious elephant in the room here is that the market Bach is targeted at is quite small - people who understand and appreciate technically good music (that doesn't include me). Most people have music they'd rather listen to that is not composed by Bach. The market has completely changed. Ordinary people listen to music regularly nowadays. Possibly daily. That was never a crowd that Bach did well with.

So we probably still have Bach-style compositions but most people neither know nor care.

Bach was a fashion(-driven) designer like any other artist, reacting to and driving trends of his time.

With that framing, they never stopped composing like Bach

It takes years to learn to compose in Bach's way. However, if you go to a university for this, they will tell that they don't want new compositions in Bach style, they want some "modern" classical music. So what is missing is some kind of Bach academy, where they would promote composers writing new music in this style.

They still do? One instance is MASTER BOOT RECORD and it's metal styled after Bach's composition styles made on a 486DX. It is very popular.

https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/

I believe students of composition will usually "cover" that era and intentionally write music like Bach, but it would be very strange if the teacher then said, "That's it. That's the pinnacle. Now, get working on your resumes."

It's a bit like asking, why don't they do math like Euler anymore?

we haven't exhausted the Bach we have. It's a lifetime's work just to study and appreciate it all. There are composers who have written great homages, my current favorite is Agustin Barrios' "La Cathedral," second movement (https://youtu.be/dmc6KV0_UVM?t=271), which has most of the elements of one of Bach's preludes.

It begs the question of what would it even mean to compose like that? You can't reproduce it with fractals or anything procedural. You might be able to use AI to imitate it, but each voice is a distinct set of musical ideas and someone has to have those to write them. The start would be to just start doing arrangements of his work to begin to understand them. It's a different relationship to music, where it doesn't bear imitation.

It's like asking, why they don't paint like Caravaggio or sculpt like Michelangelo. There is a reason why these pieces of art are called classical. The same goes with classical literature. They don't write like Plato.

The book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is a challenging read, but it highlights some of the magical depth in Bach's music. What he accomplished was very unique and brilliantly complex.

Because they can't. If you mean "like Bach" in terms of the specific stylistic tropes - he literally spent a lifetime developing them, they're exceptionally complex, and there are very very few people with the same combination of taste, cognitive capacity, and book learning who might reproduce them convincingly.

And if even if someone did that - what's the point?

If you mean in terms of complexity etc - this is an era of shallower, more emotionally direct music. The complexity is all in the production, sound design, and mixing, and not so much in the writing and arrangement. A lot of skill goes into pulling a good mix together, but it's a different, much less obvious kind of skill.

If someone wants to experiment with equivalent levels of intellectual complexity - get a copy of Csound or something, pick a language for a front end to generate Csound events using composition rules, and see where you get to.

IMO that's the biggest unexplored area in computer music, with the potential to combine new sonic structures - designed with taste and aesthetic awareness, not just for the sake of tinkering - with new kinds of sound design.

Is there a market for it? Absolutely not. But so what?

FYI, the article is about Nikolaus Matthes who did actually write a very good (but not as good as Bach best according to critics) Passion in the style of Bach in 2019 and why nobody cares.

I think it had to be said because, at the time of me writing this comment, none of the other 16 commenters had apparently bothered clicking on the link they were commenting on.

My mind went to the novel "Time Pressure" by Spider Robinson (ISBN-10 ‎ 0441809332). It's worth reading, if you like sci-fi.

Have you played Homm3? Paul Romero killed it

The problem is that Bach's ideas will never progress any further. That's sort of sad.

Bach is timeless, some of his music was sent into outer space, and the old astronomy joke goes one day, they would detect a message using a radio telescope that said "Send more Bach!". If there is life outside of Earth, no doubt there'd be demand for it; they just don't know yet what they are missing...

More seriously, if people imitated the music of the Baroque period, it's perhaps more as an exercise to improve rather than a personal opus magnum that will be published, because that time is just over. The same may be true for imitating some specifics of Bach's style (Johann Sebastian, there are many other Bachs that are likewise recommended, e.g. C. E. Bach also wrote excellent organ music IMHO).

However, there are also timeless patterns in Bach's music that invoke/exploit recursion, symmetry, variation, reference of others and self-reference that are perhaps mandatory if you want to write the best music ever - see Douglas Robert Hofstadter's seminal book on that topic (and many fascinating others), "Gödel Escher Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid" (Basic Books, New York, 1979).

Why don't they listen to music like they the did back then?

It's Highlander rules. There can only be one master.

Asking “why don't they compose music like Bach any more?” is like asking “why don’t they make smartphones like the original iPhone anymore?”.

Bach has certain appeal (to some—not every connoisseur of classical music is in love with it), and he’s certainly been a massive influence, but culture moves on. He was among the first to really get into harmonic modulation and a lot of other ideas—and composers have been exploring them and have since taken to new levels.

If everyone mimicked Bach, we would regress; and some do mimic Bach, as the post itself states in the first sentence. There seems to be little substance in asking this question (other than to advertise one’s preferences, perhaps).

I always feel like this question begs this elitist perspective on progress and art. I don’t hate classical music, but I also don’t deify it. Classical jazz, other forms of “art” music, they’re great, and maybe they do reflect some kind of intellectual pinnacle, but as someone who was a big clubbed in my youth, I don’t see how sitting in a concert hall in a 3 piece suit is a more peak human experience than sweating and grooving in a dance hall.

I would like to see some fusion, I like longer works, concept albums, I’d really like to see more of it in modern aesthetics. I keep meditating on the phrase synthwave symphony for my next project.

"And yet no one cares. Have you heard of this work before? How many times will you hear of it from now on?" I think he might have answered his own questino.