Virtually all formally composed music prior to the 20th Century is classified (retroactively at least) as classical. Even the composers of lighter music, like Stephen Foster, Johann Strauss Jr., and Arthur Sullivan, are all listed among recognized classical composers. At that time, although lighter and heavier forms of music were recognized, there was no intellectual or commercial compulsion to distinguish an all-inclusive umbrella for popular music. Anonymous, unwritten folk music was a separate thing, though it had its influences on classical composition, particularly during the romantic era.
In the early 20th century, however, all hell broke loose. The empire of composed music split into three kingdoms: Romanticism, Modernism, and Jazz.
Romanticism, which had dominated the 19th century, continued unabated, despite obituaries like that of Copland above. Audiences were the ultimate judges. They still flocked to the concerts of Rachmaninoff and other romantics, and critics eventually came around, as described by Terry Teachont (D7) in a fine review in 2002:
Rachmaninoff was not alone. Composers like Puccini, Richard Strauss, Prokofiev and others even up to the present day, continued to please audiences with melodic, lushly harmonic music. Composers of motion picture scores and musical theater were paramount in continuing the tradition. Might it be said that John Williams is the Tchaikovsky of our current age?
It gets back to the old question, raised in Tchaikovsky vs Schoenberg, of which is more important, technical innovation or making music that is pleasing to audiences. Both are valid viewpoints, and necessary for the progress of music over the ages. In terms of ranking, an answer only emerges through consensus of many viewpoints, and we have seen that the most highly regarded composers did both.
In terms of technical advancement, the avant-garde of the composing establishment of the 20th Century, what we came to refer to as modernists, had their own agenda, one that resulted in music that was more academic or theoretical in importance than in pleasing audiences, and some were quite adamant about it.
“Any musician who has not experienced — I do not say understood, but truly experienced — the necessity of dodecaphonic [i.e., twelve-tone] music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.” and “It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.” Pierre Boulez, 1971. (as quoted by Claire Kohda, in the Guardian, March 2015 (D18)
This then was the second kingdom. The modernist movement was about radical change in the fundamental structure of music. Beginning with the subtle impressionistic shift of Debussy, continuing through the bold dissonances of Stravinsky, and peaking with the serialism (12-tone technique) of Schoenberg, the battle cry was "free the dissonance." The tried and true 7-tone diatonic system of scales and keys, with its pleasing harmonies, and tonic-centered resolutions, was to be abandoned.
The traditional seven tone scale system, which was the basis not only of romanticism but also of Classical, Baroque, and much earlier music, evolved early on as vocalists and instrumentalists adjusted their pitches to maximize pleasing harmony when singing together. Within a particular key, major or minor chords can be constructed on each of the seven tones, making possible great harmonic variety in a piece of music. Pleasing harmony can be heard in any conventional piece, but is particularly evident in a traditional barbershop quartet:
Main Street Barbershop
quartet - Pop Song Medley
Lush and varied harmony is only part of the picture. The other is resolution. To explain this, I turn to an old friend, Roger Rabbit. There is a scene where Roger, a stereotypical cartoon character, is lured out of his hiding place by the villain knocking out the rhythm of the familiar little theme “shave and a haircut ….” without finishing the melodic line. This drives the rabbit crazy, and he finally succumbs to the psychological imperative, bursting out of his hiding place to sing the final "two bits!" This return to the base note of the scale, or the tonic, is called the resolution. You can also hear it in Maria’s do-re-mi scale, where at one point she pauses on the seventh tone, "Ti." If she had walked away leaving that Ti hanging over the alpine meadow, the audience would have been as itchy as Roger Rabbit, but she does eventually return to the tonic "Do."
A conventional song thus builds tension by straying from the tonic and eventually relieves the tension by returning to it. Such music that centers on the tonic note is usually referred to as tonal. This also is avoided in modernist music by using alternate scale systems or tone rows. Debussy's use of 5-tone scales (similar to those used in most traditional Chinese music) resulted in a dreamy or timeless musical effect that is still appreciated by general audiences. Further experimentation by modernists, however, resulted in increasingly dissonant music that sounds harsh or sterile at first, but which can be satisfying if one works at it. Stravinsky's harshly dissonant Rite of Spring ballet, for example, has become a staple in the repertoire, seemingly perfect for the primitive world of dinosaurs, as used in Disney's original Fantasia. Modernist music is thus often referred to as atonal, for its lack of a tonic center.
The serialist technique developed primarily by Schoenberg, has proven more difficult for audiences, but was used successfully by Jerry Goldsmith in his soundtrack for the original Planet of the Apes, perfect for the weirdness of the story - there is no release from the dissonant tension. Alban Berg's operas, Wozzeck and Lulu, are among the most successful atonal works, but again for stories that are weird and psychologically disturbing.
Planet
of the Apes
The third kingdom blind-sided us from an unexpected source: the folk music of African Americans. While Europeans, particularly Kodaly and Bartok from Hungary, had made concerted efforts to document and preserve their own ethnic musical heritage and incorporate it into their compositions, the entrance of African American idioms into the mainstream, was by far the most significant. Work songs, spirituals, dances, and other forms of self-entertainment, incubated through centuries of slavery, were formalized through fusion with European instruments during the late 19th Century, giving us most prominently ragtime, blues, and New Orleans original jazz. These would give rise to the popular swing music and big bands of the 1930s and 40s, varied dance forms and popular songs, as well as to more esoteric forms of jazz emphasizing improvisation. All of these would contribute to the secondary explosion of forms, including rock-and-roll, that would launch the kingdom of popular music that we know today.
The real story of the 20th century is that these three kingdoms did not remain walled off from one another, but promiscuously intermarried to result in a dizzying array of new forms. The mixing of jazz forms not only gave us much popular music, but also jazz-infused orchestral music played in traditional concert halls. None other than Aaron Copland, as a fresh young composer, shocked a Boston audience with the incorporated jazz rhythms in his Piano Concerto.
Aaron Copland, Piano Concerto (1926)
So much happened in this century that Taruskin had to devote two full volumes of his History of Western music to it. I follow suit with these next two sections. Even as Popular Music was expanding as a category distinct from Classical Music, the boundaries between the two were never quite clear. Nowhere is this more confusing than in musical theater, in which the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas of the late 19th century led imperceptibly into the Broadway style musicals of the next century.
George Gershwin called his bluesy Porgy and Bess a "folk opera," and wrote it for classically trained singers. Since then it has been performed in both opera houses and on Broadway. His Rhapsody in Blue, incidentally, was one of the first, and the most successful, incorporation of a blues musical idiom into a classical symphonic medium (but see also the work of George Antheil in the upcoming list).
George Gershwin, Overture to Porgy and Bess (1935)
Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story conjures up similar dilemmas (D15). Bernstein himself said “it’s not an opera. It’s a work on its way towards being one.” It is performed both by opera companies and musical theater companies, and truly combines elements of both. Bernstein is an acknowledged classical composer, and his music for West Side Story is possibly the most extraordinary and sophisticated in modern musical theater.
Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story, Cool Fugue
In a 2015 blog post, Cindy Battisti [D16] described her futile search for clear distinctions between opera, operetta, and musical theater, especially between the latter two. Also in 2015, Chris Lynch (D17) explored the same issue, noting the recent trend to play classical musical theater, such as South Pacific, in opera houses. There seem to be no clear defining features to distinguish them, except that both operetta and musical theater are somehow “lighter” than opera. To be sure, modern musical theater can feature music of any style, including rock, country/western, jazz or rap, further confusing any attempts to classify it.
The popularity of individual songs from both Porgy and
Bess and West Side Story, incidentally, recalls the days of Verdi,
when ordinary people would walk Italian streets singing, humming, or whistling
the latest hits from his operas.
One paradoxical trend in the early 20th Century was one referred to as neoclassical, which blended the past with the present. Still a rejection of the excesses of romanticism, it skipped back to the earlier Baroque and Classical periods, often emphasizing counterpoint, to develop a modified tonal language, only mildly borrowing from other modernist trends. It was adopted by Stravinsky in the middle of his career, and served as both a respite and contrast with the harsher dissonant music fashionable earlier. Even today, neoclassical ideals mingle with atonal techniques, romanticism, jazz, and other popular idioms.
How do we then formally define classical music? Let’s see what the dictionaries say:
“serious or conventional music following long-established
principles rather than a folk, jazz, or popular tradition… (more specifically)
music written in a Western musical tradition, usually using an established form
(for example a symphony). Classical music is generally considered to be serious
and to have a lasting value.” Oxford Dictionary
OR
“Classical music most commonly refers to the formal musical
tradition of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk
music or popular music traditions” …and ….“all
Western art music from the Medieval era to the 2000s.”
Wikipedia
What??? So it’s essentially saying that Classical music is what’s left after you subtract folk, jazz, and popular music, music that is not art, is not serious and conventional, and has no lasting value? Weren’t Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger serious about their music? And does the music of Duke Ellington or the Beatles have no lasting value, while "contemporary classical music" gets it automatically? Weren’t John Williams’ numerous movie soundtracks written according to formal Western musical tradition?
So dictionaries fail us.
If I might dare to improve upon the standard dictionary definitions, there are characteristics that are usually but not exclusively associated with classical music:
The greatest classical music combines most or all of these qualities, while lesser works, whether called classical or popular, have fewer of them. The vast bulk of popular music today is indeed relatively simple, consisting essentially of melodies accompanied by stereotypical chord progressions, and typically in a steady dance-like rhythm. Classical composers on the other hand typically put as much effort into building varied harmonic and rhythmic substructures as they do into creating melodies.
Within that framework, jazz and other forms of popular
music, in the hands of highly creative individuals, may approach similar levels
of complexity. Progressive contemporary composers like Rick Wakeman and Keith
Emerson successfully blend rock and classical idioms.
On one more note, the dictionary definitions of classical music refer explicitly to the Western tradition, ignoring the classical music of Eastern traditions, much of it of great subtlety and sophistication. That, regrettably, is another story. Recently though, Eastern and Western music have also met and occasionally married. We can think of the Beatles, who incorporated Indian music into some of theirs. Tan Dun, who wrote the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, among other things, is a respected composer who combines western classical tradition with Chinese traditional music.
Ultimately, we can ignore the distinction. The best music of any form will rise to the top, the worst will be forgotten.
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