If Beethoven hadn’t written “Fur Elise” could someone else have written it?
I mean is music a unique expression of the composer or does it exist somewhere just waiting to be discovered?
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No, it would not be the same. There may be similar tunes, but not exactly the same.
Artistic expression is generally personal and unique. And infinite.
Your logic would imply a finite number of musical pieces waiting to be discovered.
Once another composer thinks of the first ten notes, then yes.
The title would be different, for example “Yiff Elise”:
It’s like if van Gogh hadn’t painted Starry Night would someone else have painted it?
I have often wondered about the first few notes of a piece of music. How many sonorous ways are there of playing four notes? Consider Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with its dramatic first four notes. How likely is it that someone else would have chosen those first notes to start a piece of music?
Sure, it’s just notes. Anyone with imagination could have come up with the same notes and the same tempo. IN this technical respect, Beethoven was simply a technician who happened to come up with a piece people like.
Same with any artist. Take an author. There is no patent on the order of words. Any two authors could write the same book with the same words.
But there are so many variants (melodies with notes for music, words and their order for books), that there is seldom repetition. Not never, but seldom.
I can’t imagine anyone else painting “Starry Night” or a troop of monkeys producing the works of Shakespeare but it seems possible that some other composer might have written “Fur Elise”. The music can be recognised in the first few notes. Those notes aren’t arbitrary, they sound nice and not just to Beethoven but to everyone so why should we think only Beethoven could have written them
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