The audience at the time was tiny, most were put off by his compositions.
This:
I really like this! I really loved Beethoven’s late string quartets as a kid (by that I mean in my 20s). I can’t get into his head, of course, but I would guess that given his extensive fund of knowledge he absolutely knew he was obliterating the conventions of two or three centuries of classical rhythm and of theoretical counterpoint with all of the parallel octaves and unison lines, hitting the second and fourth beats so hard, and the rapid triplet rhythms. This gets us to a rhythm that starts to take me to a more percussive feel. Of course he did not anticipate modern rhythms and harmony intentionally, but he was to my ears reaching out in ways that would become mainstays of popular music from the 1850s forward. Of course the melodic content is a little jarring even by today’s standards but not too far out there. When he stumbled upon things that sound fresh to our modern ears I don’t think of it so much a coincidence as that he was reaching out in so many different directions he was bound to anticipate the future at times.
Just a few points, from my limited little corner of the Universe: I’m sure nearly all know that Scott Joplin was a classically trained pianist and intended ragtime to be an extension of that genre. His very best stuff IMHO was written toward the end of his life and is not typified by “The Entertainer” amd ”Maple Leaf Rag” and whatnot. I think he had a piece called “Solace” (IIRC) that was very deeply affecting and also has some underlying Latin habanera rhythms very cleverly interwoven in it.
Also in my opinion Boogie Woogie is a simplification of ragtime, and blues is a simplification of jazz. Ragtime and jazz were to my ears two of the early seeds.
If you ever get a chance to hear what exists of recordings of North and South American music (and by that I mean the continents) from about 1895-1915 it is utterly fascinating to hear the primordial ooze and the crazy hodgepodge of influences and the bizarre combinations and permutations of the time, from classical to marching bands to African and Latin and Spanish rhythms and ragtime and blue notes and the origins of swing (which were a lot more Latin than you might expect), it is just a thrill ride if you are into that kind of thing. And it takes you into some historical insights too FWIW.
And this is an historical illustration of what
@GrimSurfer stated, and was a really excellent and telling point—that musicians (at least most) do not see boundaries in music the way many critics and listeners do. My experience (which I am trying not to bore you with because it is very unimpressive) is that when one expert practitioner of one genre encounters an expert practitioner of another genre what you see is delight and glowing joy and an expression of “how the **** did you do that?”
Some people trace the beginnings of popular Western music to La Paloma and Bizet’s Carmen around 1850. And La Paloma making its way from Spain to Cuba to North America and Europe accumulating a snowball of influences, including the habanera rhythm (an early ingredient of “swing”), the tresillo, the contradanza, Western harmonies and instruments, and some mixing of cultures and influences which, while very fortunate for the development of music, were due in great part to the very unfortunate fact of the slave trade.
And finally, I do very much enjoy listening to any of the three “Bs”— Beethoven, Boogie Woogie, and Britney Spears.
Does Beethoven represent the highest skill level of the three? Well yeah, absolutely. But you don’t have to be always reading Shakespeare. And if someone just plain doesn’t like Beethoven and has a visceral liking for Boogie Woogie or Britney Spears, so what? I get that totally. Honestly, on one level, I personally can feel it in my bones. Sometimes it’s better just to sit back and enjoy and not reflexively detangle or be critical of what is going on in the music. I look at people who are not doing that and think, that’s pretty cool.
Well, one last last thought—I think it is really nice to branch out and test your comfort zone in terms of what you listen to. There’s some real pleasure to be gained from that. So to that extent I’d say you like what you like and just enjoy it is good advice, but also a little pushing of boundaries can be very rewarding.
I could write about ten more paragraphs for each paragraph above, but then—it would be even less interesting. I’ll just say if you want to do a deep dive none of these are original thoughts on my part, there’s tons of reading and listening to do. But then again, as I said earlier, writing about music is like dancing about architecture (not an original thought either)—so I am trying to keep away from a certain type of subject matter that is best appreciated by just listening to the music.
And then as I see another poster just pointed out, there are harmonies and rhythms of other cultures, with more complex tonal scales, more elaborate rythms—Western music is far from the be all and end all.
end of (purported) brain dump