Please provide a more influential track then, I started this thread to share and learn
I find this question difficult to answer in short-hand. From a musicological standpoint it's far too vague and its premise problematic; there aren't really any metrics for this and influence is very hard to track, particularly with the advent of recorded music. At least before then you could be pretty sure that composers who worked near each other and heard each other's music in the concert halls had demonstrated some degree of influence when they produced similar sounding music. Now you can get influence from practically anywhere and combobulate it in so many ways.
The other problem is that single tracks are rarely radical. They're almost always a part of something bigger.
That aside, I'm sticking by my answer that it's probably something by Louis Armstrong. Modern pop music continues to owe a lot to him and the timing of his success was conducive to him being able to scatter his influence globally.
I don't know the answer but it's probably some classical piece from centuries ago that radically changed the music scene and has influenced every genre since then.
This is far closer to whatever the correct answer is than everything else that's been posted in this thread so far, although it's still dubious for a number of reasons:
- It's pretty rare to find examples of single composers innovating and everyone else copying. There are far more examples of many people doing the same thing at a similar time and a small subset of those doing it particularly well. We don't know Beethoven today because he "invented" romantic music; we know him because his compositions were particularly poignant.
- Western Art Music wasn't known to most of the world before the nineteenth century. The answer to this question is almost certainly a piece of
recorded music for that reason because recording coincides with international exposure.
- While it's true that western music precepts have pervaded across the globe like no other set of musical "rules", the things that tend to carry over from western music are too elemental to be attributed to a single recording. A
lot of international music has adopted western rhythmic and harmonic standards, for example, but finding "the first piece in 4/4" is simply not going to happen. Similarly, functional harmony wasn't invented by one dude and debuted in a single composition; it was the result of hundreds of years of harmonic language being distilled and transformed.
Understand where you're coming from with Amen break, but... It HAS to be Bach. Not sure which specific composition, though.
Bach is a strong candidate for most influential musician but it becomes problematic when you attempt to identify a single composition.
Otherwise you need to quantify exactly how it influenced musical forms besides it just being used a lot. A lot of samples have been used a lot.
