Mozart in mirrorshades, Bach to the future

What was going on in the 1970s and 80s that Bach and Mozart became tangled up with technology and science fiction? I’ve got a theory. A key text in all of this is the 1985 cyberpunk story ‘Mozart in Mirrorshades’ by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, available in the genre-defining anthology Mirrorshades from 1986. Originally published in Omni magazine, it depicts a world in which time travel is used to mine resources from the past, while at the same time polluting the culture of the past. So, of course, a teenage Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has become a rock star in an alternate Salzburg of 1775. In his introduction to the story Sterling writes: The figure of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart seems to have a special resonance for this decade, appearing in films, Broadway plays, and rock videos, as well as in SF. It’s an interesting case of cultural synchronicity. Something is loose in the 1980s. And we are all in it together. When he mentions rock videos Sterling must have been thinking of another…