Classical music

• 1. Introduction

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  Classical music is a tradition of art music in the Western world, set apart from Western folk music and from popular music traditions. The scholar Isidore of Seville, who lived from about 559 to 636, once declared that unless sounds are remembered by a person, they perish, because they cannot be written down. He was wrong about his own past, unaware that Ancient Greece had built systematic notation centuries before him. But his anxiety points at the heart of this story. How does a sound survive its own moment? The answer this tradition found was the written page. Since at least the ninth century, classical music has been primarily a written tradition. That single choice spawned a notational system, a body of analytical and critical literature, and centuries of philosophy about what music is for. The chapters ahead ask where the word itself came from, why a tavern concert in London mattered, how the instruments kept reinventing themselves, and why a government once spent public money to play Mozart to newborns.

• 2. A Word For Excellence

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  Classicus, in Ancient Rome, originally named the highest class of Roman citizens. From that root grew the French classique, the German Klassik, and the English classical. The Roman author Aulus Gellius bent the word toward art, praising writers such as Demosthenes and Virgil as classicus. The musicologist Daniel Heartz boils the inherited meaning down to two ideas: a formal discipline, and a model of excellence. An early surviving definition sits in Randle Cotgrave's 1611 A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, which renders classique as classical, formall, orderlie, in due or fit ranke, also approved, authenticall, chiefe, principall. There was a catch for music specifically. Literature and the visual arts could point to surviving Greek and Roman examples and call themselves classical in that ancient sense. Music could not. Virtually no music of classical antiquity was available to Renaissance musicians. The bridge to the Greco-Roman world, so solid for poets and sculptors, barely existed for composers. That absence would shape how the term attached itself to music for centuries to come.

• 3. The London Tavern

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  In 1672, a former court musician named John Banister began giving popular public concerts at a London tavern. His success arrived fast, and it inaugurated the prominence of public concerts in the city. London by then had a public concert scene unmatched by other European cities, and it was here, in 18th-century England, that the word classical first came to stand for a particular canon of works in performance. The royal court had lost its old monopoly on music. Instability from the dissolution of the Commonwealth of England and the Glorious Revolution had loosened the court's grip on its musicians. Into that gap stepped a notion of ancient music built on formality and excellence. Heartz notes that civic ritual, religion and moral activism figured significantly in this new construction of musical taste. The Academy of Ancient Music, and later the Concerts of Antient Music series, specialized in performing select 16th and 17th century composers, with George Frideric Handel especially featured. Elsewhere the path differed. Under Louis XIV, France crowned writers like Moliere, Jean de La Fontaine and Jean Racine as having surpassed antiquity, and the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully earned the label l'opera francaise classique.

• 4. The Viennese Problem

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  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven were set up by early 19th century European commentators as classical, deliberately juxtaposed against the emerging Romantic style. The three were grouped into the First Viennese School, sometimes called the Viennese classics. The label carries an awkward flaw. None of the three was born in Vienna, and Haydn and Mozart spent only minimal time in the city. The grouping was common but never strict. In 1879 the composer Charles Kensington Salaman drew a wider circle, naming as classical Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Spohr and Mendelssohn. The vagueness has never fully resolved. Today art music, canonic music, cultivated music and serious music all serve as near synonyms. The Oxford English Dictionary offers three meanings for classical in music: of acknowledged excellence, of a formal tradition distinct from popular or folk music, and the narrowest, formal European music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries marked by harmony, balance, and established forms. That last definition names a specific era, the Classical period, which the broader word can obscure.

• 5. Roots In The Church

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  The early Christian Church gave the Western classical tradition its formal beginning, creating music by and for its own worship. It probably wished to disassociate itself from the music of ancient Greece and Rome, a reminder of the pagan religion it had both persecuted and suffered under. So how much ancient music actually flowed into the Church, and into classical music after it, remains unclear. The general attitude toward music, though, came straight from Greco-Roman theorists. Music sat in the quadrivium alongside arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, the four upper subjects of a medieval liberal arts education. The scholars Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, and above all Boethius carried forward the views of Pythagoras, Aristotle and Plato. Medieval theorists frequently misread these Greek and Roman predecessors, partly because no Greco-Roman musical works survived for them to study. The musicologist Gustave Reese still credits those ancient texts as influential, since medieval musicians read them regardless of whether they understood them correctly. Some continuations are beyond dispute: the church modes descend from Aristoxenus and Pythagoras, and pythagorean tuning supplied basic acoustical theory. Ancient instruments left descendants too. The Arabic rebab, adopted from the medieval Islamic world, is the ancestor of all European bowed string instruments, including the lira, rebec and violin.

• 6. How The Page Changed Everything

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  Around 1100, monophonic chant, also called plainsong or Gregorian chant, still dominated, a single unaccompanied vocal line. Christian monks developed the first forms of European musical notation to standardize liturgy across the Church. Polyphony, multiple independent melodies at once, grew out of that chant through the late Middle Ages, becoming prevalent by the later 13th and early 14th century. The Renaissance, lasting from 1400 to 1600, pushed notation onto a staff and let composition split from transmission. Before written scores, music passed orally and changed with every retelling. With a score, a work could be performed without its composer present. The movable-type printing press, invented in the 15th century, carried far-reaching consequences for preserving and transmitting music. This written quality is the trait that most distinguishes European classical music from popular music, folk music, and even other classical traditions such as Indian classical music. It enabled enormous complexity. A fugue marries boldly distinctive melodic lines in counterpoint while keeping a coherent harmonic logic. The same notation that pinned music to a page also let musicians perform works from many centuries ago. Around 1597 the Italian composer Jacopo Peri wrote Dafne, the first work now called an opera, and his Euridice became the earliest opera to survive.

• 7. Instruments In Constant Revolution

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  Haut and bas split the medieval instrument world from at least the 13th century: haut meant loud, shrill, outdoor instruments, while bas meant the quieter, more intimate kind. Each era then rebuilt its toolkit. The Baroque period, running from 1580 to 1750, introduced the oboe, bassoon, cello, contrabass and fortepiano, while the shawm, cittern, rackett, and wooden cornet fell into disuse. Baroque ensembles stayed loosely standardized, often anchored by an unspecified number of bass instruments playing the basso continuo. The Classical era, from the 1750s to the early 1820s, locked the string section into four members: violin, viola, cello, and double bass. The harpsichord, still used for basso continuo in the 1750s and 1760s, fell out of use by the century's end, and orchestras no longer required it, often led instead by the lead violinist now called the concertmaster. Mozart expanded the role of the clarinet family of single reeds, which had not been widely used before him. The Romantic era, roughly the first decade of the 19th century into the early 20th, swelled everything. A Baroque orchestra might use two double bass players; a Romantic one could use as many as ten. The orchestra grew from around 40 players in the Classical era to over 100. Gustav Mahler's 1906 Symphony No. 8 has been performed with over 150 instrumentalists and choirs of over 400.

• 8. When Listeners Looked Backward

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  After World War II, for the first time, audience members valued older music over contemporary works. Commercial recordings, newly widespread, catered to that taste and made the preference easy to indulge. The 20th century had already loosened the old unity. Many composers rejected past techniques under the banner of modernism; some abandoned tonality for serialism, while others turned to folk melodies or impressionist feeling. The operative word most associated with modernism is innovation, and its leading feature is a linguistic plurality in which no single genre dominates. Later movements multiplied: New Simplicity, New Complexity, Minimalism, Spectral music, and more recently Postmodern music and Postminimalism. The tradition also turned global, with practitioners from the Americas, Africa and Asia taking on crucial roles, and symphony orchestras and opera houses now appearing across the world. One stranger episode shows how far the music traveled into public life. In the 1990s the so-called Mozart effect claimed that listening to Mozart temporarily raised students' IQ by 8 to 9 points, a finding published in Nature. Florida passed a law requiring toddlers in state-run schools to hear classical music daily. In 1998 the governor of Georgia budgeted 105,000 dollars a year to give every child born in the state a tape or CD of classical music. One co-author of the original studies offered a quieter verdict: he was all for exposing children to wonderful cultural experiences, but thought the money could be better spent on music education programs.