Late last night I was surfing cable looking for something to watch when I came across what appeared to be a Pink Floyd concert on one of our local PBS stations. But it wasn’t Pink Floyd. It was Brit Floyd, which is a tribute band that does concerts designed to look and feel as much like Pink Floyd concerts as possible. They are actually quite good and they are appearing here in Philadelphia on April 11th. Then I woke up this morning and realized that it is the anniversary of Beethoven’s funeral. And I started to think about how orchestras all over the world reenact Beethoven’s symphonies and other compositions all the time. And I thought about the band Dark Star that faithfully recreates Grateful Dead shows using the exact set lists of particular shows. And I realized that this is a real thing. In the future, musicians will work to recreate the works of contemporary artists and artists from the mid-to-late 20th Century. They can even use holograms to reanimate the artists on stage. They can play in the same venues in order to faithfully recreate the acoustics, or even build replicas of arenas and theaters that have been torn down.
The guitarist from Brit Floyd has obviously spent an immense amount of time learning how to play the guitar so that he can sound exactly like David Gilmour. I wondered why someone talented enough on guitar to convincingly emulate David Gilmour wouldn’t just go out and create his own music. But then I thought about Beethoven again. Why do the people who play his symphonies not just go out and compose their own music?
It’s an odd thing. And, yet, it’s not so odd at all, if you think about it.
