How would you define classical as opposed to popular music? What are the genres of each? What have the genres of Western Music been over the last ten centuries (starting with sacred versus secular)? Why are the Beatles considered popular but Strauss Waltzes considered classical (or are they?).88 responses total.
In the case of Strauss' waltzes, there is the utilitarian aspect of providing music for people to dance to. Most dancing is a polular thing to do, as opposed to the few that do it for art. So is dance music "popular" by association? Perhaps. But much dance music, and Strauss' waltzes in particular, is also listened to just for listening sake.
Well, within classical we have the subgenres of "light classical" or "pops", and what might as well be called heavy classical. They overlap, of course, and it's worth noting that the Boston Pops and the Boston Symphony Orchestra are pretty much the same people. In terms of a strictly formal definition, Leonard Bernstein discussed this in one of his Young People's Concerts. "Classical", he said, is a bad term, because strictly speaking that refers to the Haydn-Mozart period only; and "art music" is inexact, as it's not a very good definition of utilitarian music like waltzes, and much of jazz is as much art music as any classical; and "serious music" is just as much a misnomer for similar reasons. He concluded that what most clearly separates classical music from other kinds is that it is relatively exact: a performance of the same work by two different performers will differ much less in classical than in almost any other kind of music. (Excepting deliberate pastiches, of course; and this doesn't stop classical buffs from going on endlessly about what subtle differences do exist between classical performers.) This is because it is one of the few types of music that is notated: that is, it is performed from a score. Most other types of music are learned by ear, and notations (including virtually all pop sheet music) are transcriptions of performances. One other type of music that fits this definition is musical theatre, e.g. Broadway. And indeed, music by the likes of Cole Porter is beginning to migrate to the classical bins. I'm sure if there had been record stores as we know them in the 19th century, Johann Strauss would have started out in a different bin from Richard Strauss, and only slowly migrated over next to him, which is where he is today.
In my experience, pop sheet music consists of arrangements based (sometimes closely, usually loosely) on performances.
re2: That's an interesting definition, one I'd never heard before... It runs into a slight problem with Baroque music--for example the prelude, originally consisted only of a series of chords which the performer was to embellish in free rhythm, and just about any Baroque piece for a medium or large-sized ensemble has a "basso continuo" accompaniment where the bass line is given and the performer improvises chord voicings in a way rather similar to what jazz pianists do. And then there are the cadenzas to concertos...and Chopin and Liszt are both, if I remember, supposed to have been great piano improvisers. I guess Bernstein only intended his definition to apply to what we consider classical music *today*... (I'm not attacking the idea, you understand, just kind of thinking out loud...or on paper, or whatever ;-)
We should distinguish between how these styles of music were defined at the time, and how they're defined now. It would be fascinating to hear Bach's definition of Baroque music, or his contemporaries' explanation of why this newfangled "Classical" stuff is so different and exciting; but "classical music," as a blanket term covering anything from the birth of music notation to the present day, is a modern word that needs a current definition. And currently, classical music is almost always written out. Of course, even that isn't really true. People are still willing to call Terry Riley and Whatchamacallit Stockhausen "classical" even though they call for a good deal of improvisation. And no matter how anal-retentive Frank Zappa got about writing out all the notes, nobody called him a classical composer until he put out an orchestral album with no guitars.
Was there a distinction drawn between Classical and Popular music before about 1900? I can think of several genres of music that are now nearly defunct. Sacred music is still written, but probably less of it. Does anyone still write military music or even marches for parades (or weddings or graduations?). Does anyone in the US sing music for a group to do agricultural labor by? I presume dance music is still being composed. Is there any music still composed for any purpose other than simply entertainment?
One difference between most classical and most popular music may be complexity. Classical music tends to repeat with variations in melody, harmony, and rhythm, whereas popular music just changes the words, and is therefore possibly easier to understand on the first try. Is there popular music that requires knowing how to go about listening to it?
I understand classical music better than I understand popular music. I can distinguish sonatas and canons and various symphonic forms, etc, but I do not know what *defines* (say) Jazz, Swing, Dance, etc. That is, what would a computer read in a score for these forms that would lead to a specific style identification. I have asked Jazz musicians, but as far as I can interpret their answer it amounts to that they know it when they hear it.
There was a distinction between folk and aristocratic music before 1900, but that's not quite the same as the distinction between classical and popular, since there are poor folk who like classical and rich folk who like pop music.
Sindi, I'd have to disgree, I think. At least, it's not that simple. Many classical forms have repeated sections - and they are apt to be exact repeats, possibly up to a relatively short ending which varies. Often within those sections there is repetition with much variation of thematic ideas, of course. Commercial popular forms, on the other hand, very often have a good deal of variation on what are basically repeated sections (say, the successive stanzas of a song, which is what I take you to have in mind). In many cases there are rhythmic variations even in the melody (to adapt to the rhythm of the lyrics), and variations in the notes of the melody are not uncommon; but variation is much more common than not in the accompaniment, even in forms which aren't primarily improvisational. I don't know that I disagree with your basic statement that classical is apt to be more complex - I'll have to think about it - but there's so much variation in each that it's kind of hard to say. (Variation in degree of complexity, I mean.)
Thank you for disagreeing. I have learned something. Is there anyone reading this who can link the item to nonclassical music conf? So how would one decide just by hearing a piece of music if it can be classified as classical? Sacred and secular music used to borrow tunes back and forth (L'homme arme mass, on a popular tune). Is there much of that done nowadays between classical and popular?
Even better, how would one program a computer to read the score and decide? There must be objective distinctions if there are subjective ones.
There's no single definition of classical music that could conform to what's being asked for in #11-12. There certainly are ways to distinguish, in pure sound, between, say, 19th century Germanic orchestral music and punk rock, of course, and one of them is instrumentation. But here's a thought experiment. How do you distinguish between lush classical orchestral music of the late Romantic diatonic tradition, like Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, from lush orchestral muzak? The instrumentation is the same. It sometimes takes me a few seconds to tell which one I'm listening to, but I usually can. The differences lie in structure, in development of material, in uses of instruments, and in styles of harmony. Just to pick a couple things that come to mind, I guess you'd hear a lot more suspensions and passing tones, and a lot fewer doubled thirds, in the classical music than in the muzak. Improvisation (like cadenzas) and ornamentation have always been part of the classical tradition, but it's a relative thing. A lot of Baroque ornamentation was written into the score in a shorthand way. And the improvisationary part is a relatively small part of the whole. I didn't know anything about Zappa's compositional practices, but if he did write down all of the notes, that would explain why I've seen him listed as a modern classical composer even outside of the context of his works for orchestra. So that exactitude is relevant.
Did the Beatles write and perform classicl music?
I like dbratman's thought experiment in #13. I've had the same experience. It does get a little blurry around the edges, which I think is the problem we have in coming up with an objective definition. Ravel's sugary orchestrations of the four movements from Le tombeau de Couperin could easily pass for contemporary elevator music. Some of John Adams' music sounds like New Age, or movie music. Pachelbel's horrid Canon *is* New Age. Vaughan Williams turned his background music for the movie Scott of the Antarctic into his 7th symphony. Prokofiev's movie music is presented in concert format all the time. If you want a disorienting experience some day, listen to John Williams' music for the famous Ewok "Forest Battle" scene: it sounds exactly like the scherzo movement from some Soviet symphony -- but by whom? Prokofiev? Shostakovich?
<davel protests description of Pachelbel's Canon as "horrid">
s/horrid/delightfully ubiquitous
I'd even agree if you changed it to "painfully ubiquitous". The thing's not the greatest piece ever written, and I'm tired of it too (sometimes, anyway); but I still like it, and also think that it's not a bad piece.
I agree - good piece, but overdone, and frequently done badly. (It was probably intended to be played at twice the tempo that it's usually performed.)
I don't think it can be "overdone". It is your fault for listening to it too often. Done badly is another matter. But the original time signature should be available - what was it?
The quarter note = 63 beats per minute.
Pachelbel's Canon is the exception that proves (not tests, proves) the rule. The Canon as so well known today bears little resemblance to what Pachelbel wrote, or intended to be heard. It's a thoroughly reworked arrangement made in the 1960s by a German conductor whose name escapes me at the moment. What remains of pure Pachelbel in it is the chord progression, which is the most classical thing about it. Even more of a fabrication is Albinoni's Adagio, which is possibly based on a few notes by T.G. Albinoni, but otherwise bears no relation to him at all. It seems to have been invented from whole cloth by an Italian musicologist in the 1940s who claimed to have arranged it. "Film music," though, is not a different genre from classical music. Film music is whatever people write for films, just like "dance music" is whatever people dance to. Some of it is classical, some isn't. When classical film music is played in concerts, it's usually arranged into suites or other larger entities, simply because in original form it's too fragmented to make enjoyable listening. But it's not disqualified from being classical because it's background music. Mozart's Serenades were written as background music. (For aristocrats' dinners and parties, though, not for films. Mozart was precocious, but not that precocious.) C.Keesan writes, "Did the Beatles write and perform classical music?" What makes you think they might have?
Didn't Paul McCartney write some sort of cantata a few years ago? Has anyone heard it? Good point re movie music. Some of it isn't classical at all. (A century ago, it might've been called "incidental music.") In movies you have people like Bill Russo (I think it is) who cribs from classical composers all the time. His music for Victory is an imitation of Shostakovich's 5th symphony. For The Right Stuff he borrowed from Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. It works the other way, too, nowadays: John Adams based his Chamber Symphony on cartoon music.
I heard Sir Paul McCartney's Quartet, which sounded rather similar to what he wrote for four voices. Short parts that repeated. Why is Beatles music not considered classical, but Schubert's songs are? Are Straus Waltzes classical? Ragtime dances? Swing dance music? Contradance music?
Heh. It's because Schubert's aren't "songs", they're "lieder" ... 8-{)]
Re #20 and #21: Actually, Baroque music doesn't have "original time signatures." The metronome wasn't invented yet. Any numerical tempo marking in a published edition was added much later by some editor.
Re #24, Leonard Bernstein was comparing the Beatles to Schubert back in the 1960s. When you listen to a song like "Penny Lane," there's a traditional form (something like ABABA, I believe), economy of melodic elements, an instrumental interlude, all that classical stuff. Why is "Penny Lane" pop music but "Erlkonig" (composed when Schubert was a teenager) is classical?
Erlkonig is disturbing.
I think the Beatles music is slowly becoming classical. I hear orchestral arrangements of it. How about Simon and Garfunkel? Ballet music from musicals?
What is Erlkonig and why is it disturbing? I heard a song Schubert wrote at the age of 17 today (as part of my piano teacher's group class in preparation for a mostly-Schubert recital) "Gretchen at the Spinning-Wheel" was the English translation she gave of its name. I don't suppose it's the same piece...
Erlkonig is a Danish poem translated by Goethe, making it very famous in German speaking countries, and set to music by Schubert. It is a ballad about a very sick boy being carried by his father (by horse) to seek medical help, when the boy starts to hallucinate about seeing the "Elf King". The father tries to allay the boy's fears, but fails and the boy dies. "Wie reitet so spaet Durch Nacht und Wind Es ist der Vater Mit seinem Kind." The music reflects the terrible ride through the night and the wild images the boy sees and his father's terror. (I learned the poem in high school German, and can still recite most of it.) Of course, anything written by Goethe is now "classic" (except maybe "Wasser und Wein"), and set to music by Schubert....well, it is "classical" from the start! 8^}
To say that Schubert's lieder are classical music while Beatles songs are not is not to pass judgment on their quality. It is merely to observe the style and medium in which they were written, and the context in which they were issued. One striking difference that may not be obvious is that the music of the Beatles' songs were never written down by their composers. (Any sheet music of Beatles songs was prepared by arrangers, and there exists a large book of painstakingly detailed transcriptions of every note of Beatles recordings.) I've heard some of Sir Paul's reputed classical music. (That's one ex- Beatle, so I didn't realize this music was what was meant by "the Beatles writing classical music," or one of the things that was meant.) My personal judgment is that it hovers on the edge of classical but doesn't really belong there. Arguments in favor: the instrumentation; the fact that classical musicians have played it, and not in an "arranged pops" context; the fact that McCartney thinks it's classical; that record stores shelve it there. These are not trivial points: they are all part of medium and context. Arguments against: that McCartney doesn't do his own orchestration, or even all his own composition, relying on his arrangers to pull his musical thoughts together; that at least some of the shorter works (all I've heard in full) have an entirely episodic structure without the kind of development and variation universal in classical music; harmonic writing characteristic of orchestral muzak and not of classical, even light classical pops. These, to my mind, are stronger arguments, but the definition of "classical" may change in the future to include these works. It's worth noting that George Gershwin, a supreme master of jazz composition, wanted desperately to be a real classical composer too. He started at the beginning, took lessons in classical composition, learned to orchestrate his own works. He wasn't very good at orchestration or structure, but he followed all the rules and was getting better at it when he died, still very young. Sir Paul hasn't yet reached the point that Gershwin was at when he started.
There are a couple of possibly true stories about Gershwin's quest for a teacher. Ravel and Stravinsky both turned him down, Ravel with the explanation that he was already a first-rate Gershwin, so why risk turning him into a second-rate Ravel. According to Stravinsky, he asked Gershwin how much money he made the previous year. Gershwin gave him a number that would be staggering even by today's standards. Stravinsky said, "Then *you* should be giving *me* lessons."
Are Sousa marches classical? Is anyone still writing marches - maybe for football games? Any classical marches written since Sousa? Is all music written recently for use in churches classical? Has there been any classical religious music written recently?
A lot of classic gospel music, and even some early examples of what we'd call rock and soul now, were written for religious use. None of these are classical.
It occurs to me that there cannot be a rigid distinction between popular and classical music because, if there were, someone could write music that included the properties of both, and hence there would not be. (An example of reductio ad absurdum.) So...what are we talking about? Grays. I think that a number of responses here have touched upon musical properties that lead music to tend to be considered toward the classical or popular, but we will never have a clear distinction. (Ravel's classical Bolero is certainly popular!)
(Well, in theory, there could be mutually exclusive descriptions that prevent someone from writing a piece that fit in both categories. In practice, that's just not going to happen.)
If all music *must* be classified as classical or popular, that cannot happen. Nothing prevents a person from satisfying both criteria. You would then have to invent a third category - but that would only be defined by not being a or b, and would itself have no specific definition, so you could not tell how to identify music fitting the "neither" category without reference to the others. You would also have to specify what a piece must NOT have in order to be classical or popular. I don't think this whole mess is feasible.
There are grays, lots of them. That doesn't mean that there's no difference, or that the distinction is useless, or anything like that. The criteria dbratman considered in #32 sound pretty good to me, on the whole and off hand. Re #34 (and #35), most churches today use very little classical music. Not only music for congregational singing and performed vocal music, but also "service music" (music, normally instrumental, played essentially as filler while something else is happening - prelude, postlude, offertory, etc.) is typically pop. It ranges from generally light-classical-muzak-style arrangements to rock, depending on the church. (This is less true in highly liturgical churches - fairly high-church Episcopal, Catholic, Lutheran, but even there classical is far from universal & may not be the norm any more. My impression is that Orthodox churches still mostly use what would have to be called classical, but I have no direct experience there.) Of course, there are lots of gray areas there, too.
I tend to agree with davel (and dbratman), but only qualitatively. My problem is what constitutes categories when there are only grays. For example, can we logically classify the visible spectrum of colors into two categories in some meaningful way? Not being a trained musicologist, I don't have sufficient vocabulary to try to explain how I distinguish "classical" and "popular", but in lay terms, I find that what I consider classical works with musical ideas for their own sake for our enjoyment, with harmonic and rhythmic modulations, thematic development, and with greater varieties of themes, harmony, rhythm and development within a piece. Someone else said "classical" is more complex, but that is not quite the same as variety. Popular music does all these things too, but (as it becomes more "popular") to a lesser extent. The emphasis in popular music is often primarily the rhythm, or the harmony, or the theme. I consequently usually find popular music more repetitive and less musically interesting. On the other hand, popular music is often more utilitarian - such as for dancing, or telling a story (ballads).
The only Orthodox church service I've been to sounded pre-classical, if anything. That is, the singing sounded very much like Gregorian chant. Of course, they could have been singing chants written yesterday in the Gregorian style, for all I know.
Russian Orthodox church music was, at least much of it, written by composers in the nineteenth century is a specific style that stressed a strong bass part, and gave the melody to the first tenors. I know, because I sang second tenor in one choir (the other tenors could not read music so had to sing the melody). Tchaikovsky wrote some. Some of the music is quite nice. I used to know the Old Church Slavonic version of Pater noster - (Oche nash). The Catholic church music that we sang, the modern stuff, included some that was really, really boring - the same few notes repeated with different words, much less interesting than Gregorian chant. The message was important, I suppose, but we could not stand more than two years in a row of each week's 'music'. I think Orthodox Jewish religious music must not have changed much over the past five hundred years or so, but the Reformed music has been modernized and sounds pretty Western to me. The Orthodox sounds more like Gregorian chant.
I have seen Sousa in the classical bins. He's definitely in the gray zone. Besides marches, he wrote operettas. So did Victor Herbert, Rudolf Friml, and Oscar Straus, all also grays. Then there are composers who are less gray, but who worked both sides of the street. Among those who wrote Broadway musicals: Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Leonard Bernstein (as if you didn't know), and Meredith Willson all also wrote genuine serious classical music. And their origins were highly varied. Gershwin began as a jazz pianist and a pop song writer. Weill began as a serious modernist German composer. Bernstein began as a symphony conductor. Willson was first a flutist in the Sousa band, and then moved to the New York Philharmonic: how's that for versatility?
At best tangentially relevant to the overall discussion: Re #41: Dan, I meant "classical" as opposed to popular, as we generally have been in this discussion, not as opposed to baroque, romantic, etc. The Orthodox liturgical music I've heard has included some chant that is either early music or imitative of that - that's part of what I meant by "would have to be called classical", as early music is definitely classical-as-opposed- -to-pop. (Possibly another reason for rejecting complexity as *the* distinguishing character of classical music, BTW.) And Sindi is right that you can find plenty of Orthodox liturgical music written by 19th-c. composers; my point was that I have no direct knowledge of what you'd find actually being played and sung in an Orthodox church any given Sunday. My impression is that they are pretty committed to an older tradition, but I don't know for myself. Re #42: Sindi, just to be picky, it's "Reform" (not "Reformed") Judaism, and some of those so described tend to be a bit sensitive about it.
Thanks for the warning, but the pronunciation is probably the same for Reformed Judaism and Reform Judaism so I have probably not unintentionally offended anyone. We were brought up orthodox and had to learn the seder music over again at the house of friends who were not.
More thoughts: Yes, marches are still being written today, usually for college or especially high school bands. They are in the style of Sousa (or not :-) but need not be so formulaic in structure. Marches certainly go closer to classical than any other category. Now take Leroy Anderson. You know many of his works, even though you don't know it :-) - Sleigh Ride, Syncopated Clock, Bugler's Holiday, Waltzing Cat, the list goes on. Many of them were "delivered" as orchestra pieces. It was popular music of its era, but delivered by a "classical" mechanism. Lastly, do NOT, I repeat, *NOT* ever let musak orchestrations of anything lead you to believe that whatever it is could be classical therein! :-)
On sacred music: It's still being written, in many styles. Christian rock and cantatas come immediately to mind.
Jim and I were trying to come up with some simple scheme that could be used to classify the various genres of music, such as how much they were based on melody, harmony, rhythm, and variation. What we came up with is: jazz - lots of variation, little rhythm or melody (but the jazz that we hear is mostly what the dentist plays - please correct us). new age - all harmony, no variation and not much melody. Simple rhythm,good for falling asleep by. Possibly, again, we have not heard the better ones. rock music - no variation (except for words),no melody,very simple and repetitive rhythm and harmony. folk music - melody and rhythm, simple harmony, little variation dance and march music - lots of rhythm and melody, little harmony and variation (unless you get more towards classical such as Strauss and Sousa) baroque classical - stresses harmony and variations, repetitive rhythm (the instrumental works, anyway) classical classical - stresses melody more than harmony, lots of variation classical music in general has more variation than pop and less than jazz moderm classical - melody (but thenotes in the melody often bear little or no harmonic relation each other, lots of rhythm (Stravinsky) - I don't listen to enough post-1900 to really know much about it, due to lack of whatIthink of as melody. Are things changing? medieval classical - complex rhythm and variation, harmony less important. rock music Ithink started as dance music, they both stress repetitive rhythm jazz supposedly also started as dance music but lost its repetitiveness marching is not seriously different from dancing except that I don't think you usually march in 3/4 time. Please prove us wrong.
My take on your categories: Jazz is popular-music-based, but characterized by lots of improvisation. The melody of "Take the 'A' Train," for example, might be subject to so much improvised variation by the soloists that you wouldn't recognize it. Also, jazz tends to be performed by certain combinations of instruments, usually but not always including a bass (acoustic or electric) and a drum set. "New Age" is a temporary vogue classification. It's the post-hippie version of what was called "mood music" 40 years ago. It can be performed by almost any combination of instruments from solo keyboard or synthesiser to full orchestra. Some of it is descended from the so- called "fusion" jazz of the 1970s. Some of it is folk-music-based, usually pseudo-Celtic. Rock music is often - not always - based on African-American music, especially blues. Electric and electronic instruments predominate: guitars, bass, keyboard. Lots of drums and other percussion. There are many, many varieties. Folk music is traditional music sung and performed from memory by musically uneducated rural people, extended to include music by urban or suburban musicians in the style of true folk music. Since true folk music is hardly ever written down or recorded, the work of pioneer collectors such as Holst and Vaughan Williams in England, Bartok and Kodaly in middle and eastern Europe, and Pete Seeger and Carl Sandburg in the US, has been invaluable in saving folk music which would have been lost forever as the ethnic groups died out or became assimilated and citified. Dance music can be almost anything. March music is what bands march to. Baroque classical is music composed during the baroque period, which included most of the 17th and part of the 18th centuries. Certain forms were developed in this period -- fugue, passacaglia, chaconne, choral hymn, overture, etc. Classical classical is music from the mid 18th to early 19th centuries. It saw the full perfection of the four-movement symphony with sonata-form first movement, the three-movement concerto, opera, theme-and-variations, keyboard sonata, string quartet, art song, and many other musical forms in use to this day. The modern "classical" orchestra also developed during this peroid. Romantic classical is music from the early 19th thru the mid-20th centuries. The forms are sometimes freer, the harmonies tend to wander a bit more, the orchestras are much bigger. The music may sound more "dramatic" and less "formal" to some people. Modern classical is a grab-bag of styles. It can be lushly gorgrous, as in Debussy and Ravel, or dissonant and arrythmic, as in Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Some of it is based on folk music. The "Neo- Classical" style featured classical or baroque forms and instrumentation in a sometimes abrasive parodistic setting. Serialism is the style the dominated the mid-20th-century. Audiences hated it. It was folowed by a return to more traditional sounding music. "Medieval classical" sounds like a misnomer. Anyway, I know next to nothing medieval music.
This is an interesting attempt, but it's hard to comment on. Melody, harmony, and rhythm are the three elements of music, and most music has all three. Which is most important is more subjective than anything else. What you call "Classical-classical music" has a simpler harmonic style than Baroque music, and is richer in hummable tunes, but does that make it less harmony-oriented and more melody-oriented? I'm not so sure. "Medieval classical" is only a misnomer insofar as "classical" means the Mozart late 18C period, and insofar as all written music surviving from that period falls into the more general classical category (making the "classical" in the broader sense label redundant). Actually, one should distinguish between medieval music and Renaissance music. Its history is very rich, but most of what survives is vocal church music. This started out very simple harmonically back around 1200 AD or so (earliest stuff we have), but within a couple centuries became richly complex harmonically, and is almost devoid of "beat" (rhythm in the simple sense). It's very melodic in its sense, but lacks what we would call good tunes. So again, I don't know how to classify it in your scheme. However, the instrumental music of the period, what survives of it, is entirely different: it's mostly dance music: highly rhythmic, simple harmonically, and very catchy melodically. 20th-century classical, as Michael suggests, is all over the map. Rhythm has gotten much more complex, so has harmony; variations are no more nor less common; melodies are often more angular: that is, they jump around rather than flowing smoothly. (Think: Prokofiev) Though there are certainly many exceptions to all of these trends.
What are the most recent trends (fads?) in modern 'classical' music (21st century)? I hear rumors of a romantic revival. Can recent movie music be classified as something separate, or does it fall into one or more other categories? Prokofiev wrote movie music. How would one classify whatever is being written for recent musicals (which I have not heard)?
Byw, who are the American folk music collectors? I said Seeger and Sandburg, but my memory is hazy and that sounds wrong the more I think of it. The name Lomax sticks in my mind. If someone knows something about this to be certain of it, please share.
I know a little, but not enough to say much. Certainly Alan Lomax was one of the big names. You'd probably want to include the people who went out and made *commercial* field recordings, blues & country in particular, in the 20s & 30s, and some who went out tracing, locating, & providing exposure for some of those same artists during the 50s through around 1970. At one time I could have at least dropped a few names, but it's been too long. To pick a minor nit with resp 49: much jazz improvization is essentially free creation of a new melody against a song's harmony, rather than variation on the original melody; thus the unrecognizability becomes almost instant. (This is especially true since sometime around <dave gets vague> 1950 or so.)
How is jazz different from medieval church music, where new faster melodies were sung (possibly improvised before eventually being written down) against a very slow tenor doing the original tune, which was no longer very recognizable? Was jazz originally supposed to be dance music, or was it based on songs (for voice) that were orchestrated?
I was once told, by a jazz pianist, that Jazz is defined by the use of a particular chord progression, which he demonstrated to me, and then he played a lot of jazz, with improvisation, and showed me that every one of the pieces used chord progressions with the same characteristics. This is a far cry from how md defines jazz. I do notice that musically trained people can identify when jazz is played, but they are certainly not using md's definitions, which in any case seems to be too vague to be useful: people could write music according to the prescription given, which I am sure would not be considered jazz.
Medieval church music was not normally improvised - particularly the features you mention, Sindi. Very much composer-driven.
Sorry. Jazz is music that always features the chord progression that a jazz pianist once played for Rane Curl. Silly of me to think otherwise.
How does anyone know whether the melismas sung at the same time as the tenor were improvised by the singer and only later written down (like codas were during later centuries)?
Well, there are some chord progressions that are especially typical of jazz music, and some chord progressions that you'd almost never find in jazz. This is one of the things that distinguish jazz from other improvised music styles (classical cadenzas or heavy metal guitar solos or whatever). From what I know about jazz, you'd have to look pretty hard to find a jazz piece that doesn't depend on so-called ii-V-I progressions. (Basically, chord progressions that move downward by fifths. Think "I Got Rhythm" or the first few bars of the Flintstones theme.) Starting in the '60s, there were some pieces that would just sit on one or two chords rather than using complete chord progressions and this was a big scary deal, the end of music as we know it, etc., etc. Coltrane wrote some pieces where the chords sometimes move by thirds and not fifths, but these pieces also do have some ii-V-I progressions in them, and the consensus seems to be that they're damn hard to play and sound funny. So I'm sure you _can_ have a jazz piece without one of these progressions. If nothing else, I'm sure someone's written one just to be contrary. But they're one of the features that will make a piece of music sound like jazz, and removing them from jazz entirely would probably turn it into a whole new style of music.
Thanks for the confirmation, orinoco: live and learn, md.
Some of us, anyway. ;-)
How would one define the type of music that a recent chat request from India
says he likes - rock 'medium' metallica? When I said I knew nothing about
this he decided he had to leave now (fine with me, the conversatin was polite
but sort of boring, despite efforts on both sides). Does most rock music fit
neatly into some category or are they all definable the way you seem pieces
desribed in the Observer: rockabiliy trio with elements of postpunk, funk
and swing; blue-based, funk-flavored rock 'n roll; funk-oriented jazz-rock
with a penchant for psychedelia; acoustic jam-oriented folk-rock,
country-rock with glee club harmonies.....and occasional neopsychedelic
yearnings; funk-rock party band.....
New Age music appears to include classical Indian, Bulgarian folk,
Russian Church, and anything else that is not easily classified as rock,
American folk, pop or classical. I would not even attempt to list what goes
into the Canadian classical (?) station's classical and 'beyond' (later than
classical, implying that classical ended around 1900, or beyond
classification?).
Could someone link this to the Music conference for some input on the
nonclassical genres from the nonclassical listeners there?
I have no idea what is meant by 'funk' or 'rockabilly' or 'postpunk' or even
'punk' - do they have a predictable harmonic progression?
Fads in 21st century classical music? It's a little early to tell. Fads in 20th century classical music? Not one, not two, but A Lot. Serialism, chance music, socialist realism (Soviet and American varieties), neo-classicism, jazz-classical fusion (of various kinds), minimalism (Eastern European and American varieties) - these are some of the major ones. I'm not sure what keesan meant by neo-Romanticism. A few composers, like Sergei Rachmaninoff, kept on writing as they had in the 19th century, on the grounds that they weren't going to change their style just because the calendar had turned. A number of non-faddish composers, like Jan Sibelius, were writing distinctively 20C music but, since they hadn't jumped aboard the fad wagons of massive change, sounded more conservative and thus closer to the Romantics than other composers, so they sometimes got called neo-Romantics. And some of the American socialist realists, notably Howard Hanson and Samuel Barber, were more Romantic in temperament than the others. Their music has some of that Romantic sound but, except for Barber's "Adagio for Strings" (which is an arrangement and doesn't sound as lush in the original string quartet version), isn't usually mistakable for 19C music either. A lot of the early Hollywood film music composers wrote heavily lush stuff in their film scores, but the ones who wrote concert music were more akin to Sibelius (if not always sounding like him) in the approach they took to that.
I meant to ask if people were returning to writing classical music of the sort that had tunes that are easy to remember and sing because their notes bear some common mathematical relation to each other, such as 5 3 1 3 5 1 (name that tune). What passes for melody in a lot of 'modern' music could have been generated by throwing dice.
[Star-Spangled Banner?] I've never heard Barber or Hanson described as socialist realists before. The American strain of listenable modernist music that corresponds to socialist realism is sometimes called "populist" (Aaron Copland, Roy Harris). Socialist realism was mainly a Soviet phenomenon. One critic defined it as "a tune Stalin can whistle." Barber and Hanson would've been denounced as "formalist" if they'd been writing in Russia instead of the USA. Both have been described as neo- romantic composers, however. I never quite figured out what neo- romantic is supposed to mean, exactly. Something like "writes romatic- sounding music after Stravinsky and Schoenberg taught us better." I.e., there has to be a gap between romanticism or clacissism and the composer's music for it to be called "neo-" anything. In Hanson's case, there probably was no gap. But there were elements of "modernism" in both Barber's and Hanson's music. In Hanson it seldom goes much beyond Debussy, Ravel and Mahler, but Barber wrote some pretty abrasive stuff. He even used a serialist- sounding tone-row in his Piano Sonata. As dbratman points out, only Barber's Adagio might've sounded at home in a 19th c. concert hall, and I wonder about even that. Barber once addressed the critics' frustration at trying to pigeonhole his music by saying, "I just keep doing, as they say, my thing. I think that takes a certain courage," Re #64, many of the composers who have been described as "minimalists" are now writing music of a neo-romantic cast. John Adams was one of the pioneers, if you could call it that, of this trend. Toward the end of one of his orthodox minimalist pieces, a full-blown melody erupts without warning. Also, I'm told Philip Glass has been composing some treacly old-fashioned stuff, which indicates to me that he never had any talent to begin with. All kinds of mediocrity can be hidden behind the various "movements," "schools" and "-isms."
["clacissism"? I think I meant "classicism." Too early. Must have coffee.]
keesan: the definition of neo-Romantic music as "a tune that the people [or Stalin, for that matter] can hum" is, intentionally or otherwise, a pejorative one, because it bears the assumption that modern music makes no concession to tunefulness, and any music which does is some antique 19C survival, whether it actually sounds like 19C music or not. 20C classical tunes tend, as I said above, to be spiky and angular, but there are still some notable tunesmiths among composers - and these are ones who, like earlier great tunesmiths, _did_ something with their tunes instead of just playing them over and over like hacks. Two composers who are particularly good at leaving me humming are Prokofiev (esp. "Peter and the Wolf" and the 5th Symphony) and Copland (in the ballets, though note that "Simple Gifts" in "Appalachian Spring" is a borrowed tune, not his own). A lot of classical dance music is catchy: Khatchaturian's "Gayne" has some stunningly beautiful stuff in it, and Malcolm Arnold's "English Dances" are quite enjoyable. md: forgive oversimplification. The American populists often came with a load of socialist rhetoric, so they can be considered the American equivalent of the Soviet socialist realists of the same era, and the music bore some similarities of style once you adjust for nationality and quality. The difference is that the Americans did it because they wanted to; the Soviets did it because Stalin put a gun to their heads. Post-minimalist music is no more neo-Romantic in the strict sense than the populists - much less so than Hanson. Insofar as it has elements of earlier eras, it's as much classical (in ornamentation) and baroque (in harmonic approach) as romantic (in instrumentation). Some of Glass's music has been bad, to be sure, but Beethoven and Tchaikovsky also wrote reams of trash (I've heard some). But much of his recent music has been excellent by the standards he upholds, and I'd advise listening to it before condemning it - particularly necessary with Glass, as his detractors so despise his composing goals that they're ready to condemn anything he writes, whatever its quality. To summarize the goals question briefly, Glass's critics hold to the modernist principle of complexity. (At their worst, they praise complexity regardless of whether the work is good, thus leading to the phenomenon of Augenmusik or "eye music" - stuff that looks really interesting on paper, but sounds terrible.) They believe that composers who abjure complexity are either slacking off or (as you imply with Glass) don't know how to do it in the first place. This criticism has also hit Shostakovich and even Schubert. But these composers' goal is emotional effect, for which complexity is not necessary and may even get in the way. Just as we needed the pared- down orchestra and form of neoclassicism in the 20s to recover from the giganticism of Strauss and Mahler, so we need the pared-down harmony of postminimalism to recover from the jaggedness of serialism.
You're right, I mustn't reject Glass's post-minimalist works just because I can't stand his minimalist ones. But time and funds are not unlimited, so I guess I'll just change my plea on Glass's post- minimalist music to "nolo." (I would probably go out and buy one CD of it if you can recommend a good one. Thanks.) You should know, though, that I certainly don't think Glass is "slacking off," and didn't imply so. You're wrong in assuming that complexity is an issue for me. (Even if it were, I assume Glass's post- minimalist music to be *more* complex than his minimalist noodlings. Neo-romanticism imposes old-fashioned and rather formidable demands of tonality, variety and form that minimalism doesn't.) What I have *heard* is that when Glass tries to write non-minimalist music -- i.e., when he emerges from the modish "school" he helped found -- he fails. That didn't surprise me, because I have never heard in his minimalist works evidence of genius or even talent, especially.
Re Prokofiev and Khachaturian, you are right that they have catchy tunes in some of their music anyway. I was asking about what sort of music is being written now (since 1990) and whether catchy tunes, or other things that might attract someone not trained to appreciate 'modern music' are coming back into style. Is anyone writing 'classical modern' music that can be played by the amateur musician, as used to be done in previous centuries? Yes, Star Spangled Banner was the tune.
Do I get a prize? Sigmund Spaeth always gave prizes. There's always been a ton of the "classical modern" you're refering to, mostly written for student bands and orchestras by people who specialize in that. Sometimes it escapes into the concert hall, like some of Vincent Persichetti's music. No doubt a bunch has been writen since 1990. A young British composer named Andrew March wrote a breathtakingly beautiful seascape for a competition in England a couple of years ago. He took first place. John Corigliano and Ned Rorem have been writing very listenable music in the US, as has Peter Maxwell Davies in the UK. As I said earlier, John Adams' music has been pretty easy on the ears. Try his "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" some day, or his "Common Tones in Simple Time." (He also wrote a very prickly Chamber Symphony within the past ten years, which he claims is based on cartoon music.)
We heard some Liszt which Jim identified as cartoon music. Thanks, I will look for the above composers at the public library. As your prize you may enter the numbers of another popular tune. Cartoon music does not sound much like movie music and it stands on its own much better. What is it that people get out of program music (movie music, symphonic poems, songs with words, other things that don't make sense without a plot)?
It's something non-musical to hold your attention, such as the flock of sheep in Strauss's Don Quixote or the celebrated sunrise in Also Sprach Zarathustra. It's fun seeing how the composer solves certain problems. Sibelius prefixed the score of his tone poem Tapiola with a little poem he wrote about the gods of the northern forests. There's added pleasure in settling back in your chair and hearing how he makes them come to life. With movie music, of course, you get to see the movie in your head while you're listening. (Or on the screen, if that's where you're hearing it.) I'm not sure there's much program music that makes no sense at all if you don't know the plot. You can enjoy Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music, Adams' Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and most other programmatic pieces even if you have no idea what they're about, although I believe knowing can increase your enjoyment. Also, there is seldom anything inherent in the music itself that generates the mental and emotional associations. For example, we know that Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps, subtitled "Pictures of Pagan Russia," works perfectly well as background for a movie about volcanoes and dinosaurs, and that the sunrise music from Strauss's Zarathustra now conjures up in most people's minds images of ape-men and monoliths that Strauss never intended. The Roman legions marching into the Eternal City in Respighi's Pines of Rome become a very convincing pod of mystical flying whales in Fantasia II. Any music can be retrofitted with a program. Here's my mystery tune: 1155665
Ba Ba Blacksheep.
No, it has to be either Twinkle Twinkle or the alphabet song. (Blacksheep needs four "6"s.)
How I wonder what you are. (Was this tune chosen for this phrase?) Was there much program music written before the nineteenth century? (Would you count St. Matthew's Passion, for instance).
davel is right. Blacksheep would indeed require four sixes. I *meant* Twinkle Twinkle, but ABCDEFG also matches. So I guess it's davel's turn if he wants it. *I* wouldn't call the St. Matthew Passion "program music," but I don't know. Vivaldi's Seasons might be a better example from that era.
Well, I'm more into the rap version of Blacksheep. Ba Ba Blacksheep, got you wool? Yo, Dave. Yous up.
(I always mis-read "Tapiola" as "Tapioca." At the moment it's just a minor weirdness, but someday I'll actually hear the piece, and I'll be able to turn this into a witty and cutting piece of criticism. You've been warned.)
Yeah, it always reminds me of "tapioca," too. I found out that Tapio is the forest god in Finnish mythology and that the -la suffix means something like "place" or "home" in Finnish, so "Tapiola" means "chez Tapio."
[I don't suppose that helps much, now that I look at it.]
I heard something by Mark O'Connor (Conner?) that was probably modern and also had a nice melody and sounded like a fugue. Who and when is/was Mark? Finnish is related to Turkish, in which the grammar is nearly backwards from English. Instead of a preposition before a noun, you put a one-syllable ending on the noun, so maybe Tapiola means in or at Tapio. In in Turkihs is -ta or -da- or -te or -de depending on what it follows (Turkish also makes its vowels match - all front or all back - unless they are from Arabic).
Well, it's probably too obscure, but it's what comes to mind: DGGGGBD (Bonus points for anyone who actually knows the original words. Several songs have been set to this tune since, but AFAIK none of *them* are especially current, either.)
(If there are rules to this thing I've missed them.)
keesan: Limiting your question to composers writing currently (though not necessarily to their work of the last ten years: I don't always keep that au courant), I would endorse md's suggestion of Adams (probably the greatest living American composer), Maxwell Davies (possibly the greatest living British one - when looking for his stuff, be aware that he's filed under both M and D in different places), and Corigliano. Not so sure about Rorem, but I haven't heard any of his post-1970 work. And to them I would add the Michael Gang, consisting of the two living American composers I consider the most fun - Michael Torke and Michael Daugherty - and the unpredictable Brit Michael Nyman. However, be warned: first, none of these composers are really great tunesmiths, and some of them are not really melody-oriented at all (Maxwell Davies, Corigliano, and Nyman are the most melodic). Adams, for instance, writes soundscape music. When I heard his Harmonielehre live, I felt enveloped by the overtones, something I've never been able to feel in a recording, burdened by a mere mortal stereo system. Second, many of them run the gamut in style. Maxwell Davies and Corigliano, in particular, have written very harsh and difficult music as well as the more "enjoyable" stuff. Avoid their symphonies! For Maxwell Davies, I'd most recommend a CD titled "In Celebration of Scotland" (from Unicorn, but I haven't checked to see if it's still in print). I agree with md's explanation of program music. Some works, like Dukas' Sorcerer's Apprentice and Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, don't even make sense musically if you don't know the program (though Strauss would be very hurt to be told that). Program music is music that _tells_ a story in music alone, not music that _accompanies_ a story also told in words or pictures. Thus the St Matthew Passion is no more program music than an opera or ballet is. Re "cartoon music", that's an ex post facto term applied to the kind of older music that got borrowed for early cartoons. (Besides "cartoon music" there is also "monster movie music", a term often applied to Bartok. The music the puppets danced to at the start of "Being John Malkovich" - that was Bartok.) Three pieces of classical music I first heard in cartoons, and which would probably be recognized by lots of people who have no idea what they are, are Mendelssohn's Spring Song [to underscore giddy drunken happiness], Chopin's Funeral March [to underscore impending Doom], and the pastoral theme (not the Lone Ranger galop) from Rossini's William Tell Overture [to underscore a peaceful country scene]. All early 19C, interestingly enough. md: Before I try to recommend any Glass, you'd better tell me what you think the boundary between his minimalist and post-minimalist works are. This has been a subject of much terminological confusion. Glass himself defines minimalism as what he ceased writing about 1975, when he let more traditional concepts of harmony and melody into what had previously been highly austere music. By this definition, Music in 12 Parts, say, is minimalist, and Einstein on the Beach is on the cusp, but everything since then is post-minimalist. Both Satyagraha and Akhnaten contain passages of great beauty by traditional operatic standards, whatever may be said of them as wholes. I didn't say that complexity was an issue for you, but for Glass's critics. Thus, when they say his non-minimalist music fails, it's because they're judging it by inappropriate standards. Some of which may be Glass's fault: when he writes a work he calls a symphony, that sets up expectations which Glass does not meet - but neither do half the 20C works called symphonies, including several of Shostakovich's, so it's not just Glass's failure. I am a Glass fan who does consider many of his recent works to be unsuccessful, but the critics apply their comments to the entire range of his works, so they're using different standards from mine. Also, many (not all!) of the criticisms of Glass are for doing things not remotely unique to him, and which much-loved composers have done. When Schubert's Great C Major Symphony was first discovered, its backers had a terrible time getting it performed. "Violinists won't stand for playing the same figuration for 90 bars in a row," they were told. Sound familiar? Of course there was a tune (in other instruments) on top of that figure, but there is in post-minimalist Glass too.
I was at a record shop today and almost picked up Glass's 5th symphony, thinking it surely must be post-minimalist, but the price and the box it was in put me off: $30, and it looked like a boxed set of CDs, but there appeared to be only one CD in there, plus ten or so inserts of some sort. Are you familiar with this? Wtf is it?? I think I will go back and buy at least the new Adams CD I sampled. A work for piano and orchestra, I forget the title. The second movement started out like a Satie Gymnopedie.
md: I haven't heard Glass's 5th Symphony yet, but I have all the other four. I consider them all fine works, but not his best. I'd certainly not suggest this apparently premium package to a person very unsure of whether he'd like it. If you're disinclined to tell me what works by Glass you've heard and disliked, I'll tentatively suggest two albums: "Songs from the Trilogy", a selection of vocal highlights from the three operas "Einstein on the Beach", "Akhnaten", and "Satyagraha"; and a new Glass album in Naxos's American Classics series. Tower (at least) shelves their Naxos albums separately from all others. This contains the finest performance on record that I know of his Violin Concerto, a good rendition of the string orchestra work Company, and two rather badly selected and rendered orchestral excerpts from Akhnaten. Which album you should go for depends on your tastes of vocal vs. orchestral music, and also your budget: Naxos is cheap.
I'll look for the Naxos CD. Thanks! Naxos is producing a series of CDs of the complete orchestral music of Samuel Barber, so they'd be on my "A" list if only for that. One of the CDs will include the Toccata Festiva, which as far as I know was recorded only once back in the early 1960s and never released on CD. I have to trot out my old Columbia LP if I want to hear it.
The Naxos "American Classics" series is simply amazing: although for most composers they're only issuing one disc each, their selection of composers is both broad and deep for those of us interested in the conservative orchestral tradition of American music. The performances are mostly respectable. It's very interesting to hear Glass in that tradition, and there are lots of other composers worth a passing interest. I think we were discussing Meredith Willson here or in some other thread: I picked up the disc of his two symphonies. They're not masterworks by any account, but pleasant: and I couldn't resist.
You have several choices: