Like every other form of art, music is a product of the time it was created. For this reason, music is important because it provides a window into the past and helps us understand the world we used to live in and how it became the world we know now. This is why people can identify what period a piece of music is from even if they’ve never listened to it before and how the labels for these periods were created. This is also why we associate the 80’s (1980’s of course) as having a specific look as well as the popular music of that time having a distinct sound.
As society advanced, so did music. What started as single melodies sung in unison (monophony), evolved into multiple melodies occurring simultaneously (polyphony), which resulted in the creation of harmony and the tonal language we know as Western classical music. Composers of the various times would continue the tradition they were living in while advancing new techniques and sounds inspiring their contemporaries to do the same.
During the Romantic era, composers broke away from forms and wrote more chromatic and dissonant music. Embracing these new chords and harmonies, the musical language kept growing. The Romantic period is also unique because it was the first time composers were aware they were writing music differently than their predecessors and labeled them as classical for the first time while naming themselves as Romantic. It’s hard to believe but one of the most recognizable composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, was all but forgotten until Felix Mendelssohn revived Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion in 1829. While Antonio Vivaldi, famous for his concerti The Four Seasons, was completely forgotten and unknown until the 20th century.
The Romantic technique of advancing music in new tonal ways continued even after the philosophies behind Romanticism ended. This was accomplished by not just advancing the tonal language of music but creating new tonal languages. Instead of using major or minor keys, Claude Debussy and other Impressionists used “exotic” scales like whole tone, octatonic, and pentatonic towards the end of the 19th century. The Modernists of the 20th century employed many new techniques like polytonality (using more than one key simultaneously), atonality (music with no sense of key), twelve-tone music (music that assures each of the 12 pitches in Western music are used exactly as often as the other 11) microtonality (adding pitches between the existing Western classical music 12 pitches), and many others.
In addition to being logical next steps from a tonal perspective, each of these advancements in music coincided with the history and philosophies of their times as well. Debussy hated the fact his music was labeled as Impressionistic (named so because of the art movement occurring simultaneously), but because it’s helpful and important to think of music as a product of its time we keep this label. The 20th century is very unique because of the emergence of popular music. The term classical music has two different meanings now. Classical (with a capital C) means music written in the specific period 1750 (the death of J.S Bach) to about 1827 (the death of Beethoven) and “classical music” (lowercase c) which refers to Western music that isn’t popular music. The distinction between what is classical or popular can be hard to make and is a topic for another time. Because of the popularity of popular music during the 20th century combined with the harder to understand language of “classical music” of the 20th century, a majority of people began to neglect classical music. Popular music received more media attention which increased the number of listeners which in turn increased the amount of media attention thus creating a viscous cycle. To make matters worse, because society has become so accustomed to popular music now, there’s much less interest in any classical music no matter when it was written.
Popular music has become the music people think of first as a part of our current history and I see no problem with viewing it that way. However, classical music has a lot to offer and it shouldn’t just be considered an art of the past when it can still provide entertainment that popular music can’t. Popular music and classical music are two separate yet equal worlds (with some overlap) and should be treated as such.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I hear you Dave. Michael Gordon and Sofia Gubaidulina are showing us something about now that is as relevant to our day as are *insert pop-stars name here* or some other international "sensation." And it is potentially every bit as relevant and prescient as the music of Shostakovich that blared on American, British, and Soviet radio during the second world war when folks were also listening to Edith Piaf or Duke Ellington.
ReplyDeleteBut classical music today suffers from museumism. As much as I love Beethoven, it's trapped in the past, representing a time long gone that seems irrelevant in the emerging cyber-age. You can't dance to it or you're not supposed to. It's owned, primarily, by wealthy and fairly highly educated people interested in taking their (as my wife calls it) "culture pill." It's relationship with people is primarily authoritarian because it now has to have "experts" dole it out with explanations about its meaning and purpose because its meaning and purpose are sputtering and choking. Finally, in a profit-oriented market like that in the United States, it is not "economically viable" even if is a social, cultural, and historical good. It is a charity case.