This is a great video and, even if music history and music theory isn't your special interest area, does a great job of charting how a historical myth comes about over time, and what causes those kinds of myths to persist. It also reminds me that it's kind of amazing just how much of what people learn as "music history" in primary and secondary school is just total myths that have been debunked a thousand times, and while there's a lot of nonsense that enters popular conscience as myths like this, I wonder if other fields are comprised of as much just sheer nonsense as music history is in terms of "what the average person (or even person who was really into it as a young person but didn't pursue that as an adult, who are honestly worse here) 'knows' about this field" compared to what academics know. Tritones were never banned by the church, there was no riot at the premiere of the Rite of Spring, Bach didn't write Minuet in G, Salieri didn't kill Mozart (and they were probably frenemies at worst), Beethoven never sawed off the legs on his piano, Mozart did in fact edit and revise his works (and you can see this if you even just look at an original Mozart score), "Gregorian" chant has nothing to do with Pope Gregory or birdsong and was created by the Franks at least a century and a half later, and so on and so forth. There's just so much mythical nonsense in classical music discourse, some of which gets passed down by people's actual educated school music teachers! I think some of this is intrinsic to music in general (it's just such a powerful font for myth making, with music being something most people adore but few people understand how to create themselves) but I think the general lack of broader cultural knowledge about classical music makes this worse than with other genres of music? Discuss.
