uh? what's the relationship? it's just an instrument. Bach or Handel would have written for any damn thing they could have found competent players for.

What you should be asking about is advent of audio recording. That allowed musical ideas to spread by means other than direct word of mouth or *writing it down*.

Hard to see how syphonic form and the whole western classical tradition would have come about without formalised methods of notation.

Yeah, well without writing, we'd not have newspapers, nor internet, nor nothin'.

way to miss the point. you can have lots of music without musical notation.

Well, it took a little searching to see the source of the problem here.

http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=10848#135356
>"Would symphonic music have come about if electric guitars were invented before violins?"
Yes. The early stuff was written for small groups of 4 to 8 players. I dunno, do you think the Beatles had dozens of musicians in their band?

>"Bach or Handel would have written for any damn thing they could have found competent players for."
Correct.

>"...you can have lots of music without musical notation."
And you can have musical notation without music. Case in point, Iannis Xenakis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iannis_Xenakis

>...if electric guitars were invented before violins...
I bet ya that Stratavarius "electrics" would be just as treasured as his violins.

"syphonic music" ... hmm, I couldn't have made it up ...

I once saw some French guy making music with only the sound of dripping water, amplified. Maybe that was it ...?

"way to miss the point. you can have lots of music without musical notation."

You can also have literature without written language, but it would have been a bit harder prior to recording technology that enables, say, books on tape.

There are oral traditions, and plenty of them. They are are a type of literature too. The analagous point would be that written language lets you create and pass down works of greater scope and complexity.

But the point I was making was actualy that it was sound recording (as opposed to electrical amplification) that changed the way music is learnt and created in the 20thC, by making it possible for the oral tradition to work across the boundaries of time and space.

Guitars were around at the time of Bach and Handel. Neither composed for the instrument because it was considered vulgar and unsophisticated.