What would it sound like if Beethoven came back and made a new album?

What if Beethoven came back and finally recorded a follow-up to his critically acclaimed last album, 'Ninth'? What would that sound like? This is an interesting question to me because I think it would be the longest career break an artist has had between albums (199 years)

Loud.

he'd fuck it up with overcompression because his hearing is shot

more mature than his previous work

perhaps even reflective

we have to sort of sketch the terms of his "coming back" to imagine this. let's posit that somebody gets the coffin into someplace where when he's reanimated he'll be relatively comfortable, but even then, the psychic shock of waking up in the 21c is going to have a major effect on his consciousness. electric light, amplified sound, hot and cold running water...unless he's shepherded immediately upon awakening to a piano and told "write, we'll explain everything later," we're going to get a very different Beethoven.

add to this that once he's made aware of the year, he's probably going to ask, after freaking out for a while, about musical developments since he died. well, there have been a lot. even if we decided to save "popular music went through a whole thing" for later, the developments in classical music will stun him no matter how wild some of his later stuff may have been -- Stravinsky? Mahler? fuckin' Schoenberg and all that comes after? Give our man a playlist and a bluetooth speaker and he's going to have some ideas, but catching up to speed might be harsh. But he's a smart guy; it won't take him a day to know he can't just bust out Missa Solemnis II.

I think learning a computer interface would be too much -- he can't even type -- but I think if we get him an assistant, he'd write something really immense using a synth interface. it would sound symphonic, and probably super giant, and, assuming it takes him some time, would expand on the weird where's-the-motif nature of the Missa -- he'd now feel like he's got carte blanche to just wander without end.

like "The Weirdness" probably

perhaps even reflective

He was definitely headed that way with his last few EPs tbf

Get him up to speed with music and technology at a rate of one day per year he's been away.

this will probably be Yngwie Malmsteen's best collab

It is interesting to think about who would guest on it

Dave Grohl would be on the scene before they even got the burial shroud off him

I reckon that if was even just Ludwig with yer granny on bongos, it would still be Beethoven

It'd have G-Eazy guesting

the lad was a nationalist German i think we need to be realistic here

He'd also hire Bernie Taupin to add lyrics to his existing symphonies to make them more mainstream, with a guest vocalist on each one

Xpost lol good point.

After a couple of "Ludwig and friends" albums - Rita Ora! Carlos Santana! Elvis Costello! - comes the press release where he explains that for the next one, he "just wanted to get back to the sound of one guy in a room with a piano."

Didn't Elvis Costello already put words to the Moonlight Sonata?

No doubt thought it needed improving and he was just the boy for the job.

the lad was a nationalist German i think we need to be realistic here

Roger Waters it is then I guess