Classical Music - Tod und Verklaerung
It seems that everyone interested in classical
music has to declare her or his position on the burning issue: is it still
alive, dying, or already laid out in lavender? (Recall that this was a common
practice back in the day, since the scent of the flower masked the stench of the
corpse.)
My position shares some ground with that of
Colin Eatock, the Canadian composer (in his essay, "The 'death' of classical
music," Queen's
Quarterly, September 22, 2002, available
from Amazon). Eatock suggests that this genre is not an organism, which
must be either alive or dead; he prefers to call it
"crystallized."
Another way of putting this crystallization concept is to note that much classical music activity is actually the maintenance of museums. As Eatock says,
But to suggest that classical music is entirely crystallized is hardly an accurate description of reality. Terry Teachout, in Commentary ("The Death of the Concert," December 1, 1998, also available from Amazon), points out that leaders in the field such as Michael Tilson Thomas are keeping the live concert form of the music in existence (surviving, if not thriving, pessimists would say) by programming new music and aggressively championing it, going so far as to break down the wall between performers and audiences by delivering short explanations before the performances.
Considering the history of this genre, it is not at all surprising that the forms in which it is presented must be constantly renewed and transformed. (Hence the German phrase in the title of this entry, which classical music fans will recognize as the name of a Richard Strauss tone poem, "Death and Transfiguration." By "classical music," we usually mean European classical music, which has undergone quite a few metamorphoses (extra credit to those fans who can identify this reference to another German composer) in the last six or seven centuries.
I like to think of it as a river which was derived from three sources. The first was medieval ecclesiastical music, such as plainsong (more commonly referred to as "Gregorian chant"). The second was the ceremonial music of the monarchical courts, which rose in the late Middle Ages, and the Renaissance Italian city-states, saturated with fanfares, processions, and marches, as well as the elegant dances and songs performed to entertain the royal guests. And the third source was almost the polar opposite: popular folk songs, which, though we often forget this today, turned up very frequently in the first two.
By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which is referred to as the "Baroque" period, all of these rivulets became increasingly mingled so homogeneously that it became very hard to separate them. The main function of church music was of course to enhance the experience of worship; it was the aural equivalent of the huge cathedrals and the olfactory stimulation of incense. The court music, similarly, entertained the royalty and nobility, helped (along with their palaces and the graphic art they commissioned) to create an environment in which they were reassured of their importance and power, whiled away the dull hours of governmental routine, helped their soldiers keep in step; and undoubtedly impressed the stuffings out of the commoners at coronations and other ceremonies. And the folk songs of the commoners, imported as themes into the aristocratic music, helped to remind the nobility of their roots among their subjects, as well as injecting new themes into the compositions of the composers when their imaginations needed refreshment.
Indeed, what we call the "classical music" of this period was an experience almost entirely of the aristocracy. They paid the salaries of the musicians, both composers and performers (who at this time were not distinct groups, as they later tended to become), and provided the audience, who had sufficient leisure time to appreciate the increasingly complex structures of the music. Not all the aristocracy, of course, were true musical connoisseurs, but quite a few not only understood what the musicians were trying to do, but participated in it themselves (Frederick the Great was perhaps the most notable example).
It was at this time that "classical" music began to undergo its characteristic development into a highly complex, carefully constructed genre. No doubt, the musicians attached to the courts of Europe competed with each other to entertain their patrons with ever more ingenious and elaborate aural structures; the skills of the performers became steadily more advanced, to the level that we still recognize as "virtuoso," and the bodies of musicians performing together became larger and more variegated, including more and more instruments. These included the brass family: the trumpets, which had for many centuries been so prominent a feature of the processional and military fanfares, inspiring the troops and terrifying the enemy; the French horns, developed from the hunting horns used during royal hunts, and the trombones, first used to add a note of grandeur to elaborate ecclesiastical music.
In this process, "classical" music became more and more professional, requiring high degrees of talent to compose and perform (and considerable time and effort on the part of listeners to learn how to appreciate). Thus, it began to take on another characteristic that has persisted to our time: its "upper-class," remote-from-the-common-folk nature. To be sure, in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, it began to break out of the palace. Key figures in this process were Handel and Haydn, who began to compose music for public concerts (compared to them, Mozart remained primarily a patron-supported artist, though if he had lived longer it is hard to doubt that he would have participated in this development.)
But the supreme example of the new concert composer was of course Beethoven. At the beginning of his career, he was also supported by noble patrons, but he belonged to the generation of artists who were inspired by the French Revolution, and his development more and more followed two paths: popular works that could inspire and arose the masses, on one hand, and ever more elaborate and advanced experimental work on the other. The former works tended to be written for large forces -- orchestra, orchestra and soloists, and of course his only opera, Fidelio, that passionate paean to liberation from aristocratic tyranny. The latter ones were primarily pieces of chamber music: string quartets and piano sonatas, intended to be performed for the very few "expert" listeners who could understand them. The Ninth Symphony could be seen as combining both of these tendencies: it was undoubtedly a popular success (to the extent that the theme of its last movement was chosen as the "national anthem" of the European Union, it was famously the musical accompaniment of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, and it has become an essential part of the New Year's festivities in Japan), but it also included a number of Beethoven's trademark late-period innovations, especially the introduction of voices into a symphony for the first time.
I do not want to go into the history of European classical music after Beethoven in detail here, but suffice it to say that the characteristics of the genre that were established by his career, regarded since his death as very close to the ideal model of a classical musician, have held sway until perhaps our own time. The institution of the classical music concert was based economically, of course, on the economic power of the new ruling class, the bourgeoisie. They constructed the concert halls, paid for the performances, and idolized the virtuosos like Chopin, Liszt, and Paganini. As the Baroque represented the aural self-glorification of the aristocracy, nineteenth-century "classical music," which lives on in all its glory as the "crystallized music" of Eatock, is the self-glorification of the capitalist class. (A fascinating topic in this connection is the economic interpretation of Wagner's Ring cycle, but that will have to wait for a possible later entry.)
To a large extent, I think, the travails and interesting new possibilities of today's "classical music" can be understood as reflecting the economic and political situation of capitalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But more detail about this will also need to be filled in later, since this entry has already become too long. But we can sum up the argument so far this way: the "elitist," "petrified," "rich-folks plaything" characterization of classical music which is often heard, especially, unfortunately, from the left, has a certain amount of truth to it, and this truth can be understood fairly easily from the history I have outlined. On the other hand, and notwithstanding that the "crystallized" portion of the repertoire was created by dead, white, males (by and large), it contains some of the most glorious art that has ever been made by human beings, and deserves to be preserved for that reason alone.
In addition, it is -- believe it or not -- enjoyable and even fun to perform and listen to! One of the main ways I think living classical music will be sustained in the future, as I will argue in another entry, is by a revival of the tradition of amateur performance, which was almost entirely killed by the development of recordings but seems to be coming back, at least to a slight degree. But it cannot be denied that one great factor standing in the way of classical music achieving greater popularity is that it developed to such a high level of complexity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as mentioned above, that it really takes some study for a listener to make much sense of it. Thus, it will never be "popular" in the sense that the more accessible forms of music are. But that too is a point I will develop later on.
With its well-defined boundaries, standardized repertoire, ritualized performance practices and skewed finances, it is increasingly esteemed for historical rather than aesthetic reasons -- and for those who care about its survival, that is both good and bad news.He explains this concept of the "crystallization" of classical music as follows:
Since World War I, the culture of classical music has resisted innovation and non-European influence -- despite the championing of these very things by many twentieth-century composers. Such interest as there has been in artistic novelty has led mostly to a backward development of the repertoire, as early-music specialists perform once-forgotten compositions from the Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval periods.
So strictly is classical music confined within its traditions that even the dress code resists change. One hundred years ago, an orchestral conductor went to work in the formal attire of his era: white tie and tails. Today a conductor may wear the same clothes, but they have become a costume.
As for economics, the situation was bleakly summarized by music writer Christopher Small in his 1987 tome Music of the Common Tongue. "Without governments subsidizing classical music," he observed, "most of the structure would collapse, for it has little genuine base in human lives."
Yet this is crystallization -- not death, in any "dust-to-dust-and-ashes-to-ashes" sense. As bright and durable as a diamond, classical music can still gleam with the light of a night at the Metropolitan Opera. While it's true that it cannot survive without government support, in every developed nation respect for classical music has elicited a single response: to subsidize it.(In the U.S., of course, unlike other "developed nations," the subsidy has come primarily from corporations, not the government.)
Another way of putting this crystallization concept is to note that much classical music activity is actually the maintenance of museums. As Eatock says,
There may be some readers who find my portrayal of classical music as a crystallized art form (and I am not the first to propose such a notion) disappointing, possibly even distressing. That a once dynamic, fluid music in which innovation was welcome should be relegated to the museum is not perhaps an appealing thought. But museums are valuable and useful institutions for preserving what a society values. Classical music's enshrined position in our culture assures its continued survival for many years to come. There is no reason to fear the imminent demise of Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms.This curatorial function is of course essential for the body of music we call "classical," since music only exists in performance. To preserve Rembrandts, Manets, and Picassos, it is only necessary to hang them on a wall and provide the necessary climate control and guards. If today's musicians were to stop playing the compositions of the "three Bs," however, they would cease to exist. Yes, there would still be the recordings, and some ill-educated "music lovers" (such as one fellow on a classical music e-mail list I once subscribed to) think that, now that every piece worth listening to has been recorded at least once, it is no longer necessary to pay live musicians exorbitant salaries to perform them. But any kind of music that is not performed is truly dead -- "live" music is not called that for no reason.
But to suggest that classical music is entirely crystallized is hardly an accurate description of reality. Terry Teachout, in Commentary ("The Death of the Concert," December 1, 1998, also available from Amazon), points out that leaders in the field such as Michael Tilson Thomas are keeping the live concert form of the music in existence (surviving, if not thriving, pessimists would say) by programming new music and aggressively championing it, going so far as to break down the wall between performers and audiences by delivering short explanations before the performances.
Considering the history of this genre, it is not at all surprising that the forms in which it is presented must be constantly renewed and transformed. (Hence the German phrase in the title of this entry, which classical music fans will recognize as the name of a Richard Strauss tone poem, "Death and Transfiguration." By "classical music," we usually mean European classical music, which has undergone quite a few metamorphoses (extra credit to those fans who can identify this reference to another German composer) in the last six or seven centuries.
I like to think of it as a river which was derived from three sources. The first was medieval ecclesiastical music, such as plainsong (more commonly referred to as "Gregorian chant"). The second was the ceremonial music of the monarchical courts, which rose in the late Middle Ages, and the Renaissance Italian city-states, saturated with fanfares, processions, and marches, as well as the elegant dances and songs performed to entertain the royal guests. And the third source was almost the polar opposite: popular folk songs, which, though we often forget this today, turned up very frequently in the first two.
By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which is referred to as the "Baroque" period, all of these rivulets became increasingly mingled so homogeneously that it became very hard to separate them. The main function of church music was of course to enhance the experience of worship; it was the aural equivalent of the huge cathedrals and the olfactory stimulation of incense. The court music, similarly, entertained the royalty and nobility, helped (along with their palaces and the graphic art they commissioned) to create an environment in which they were reassured of their importance and power, whiled away the dull hours of governmental routine, helped their soldiers keep in step; and undoubtedly impressed the stuffings out of the commoners at coronations and other ceremonies. And the folk songs of the commoners, imported as themes into the aristocratic music, helped to remind the nobility of their roots among their subjects, as well as injecting new themes into the compositions of the composers when their imaginations needed refreshment.
Indeed, what we call the "classical music" of this period was an experience almost entirely of the aristocracy. They paid the salaries of the musicians, both composers and performers (who at this time were not distinct groups, as they later tended to become), and provided the audience, who had sufficient leisure time to appreciate the increasingly complex structures of the music. Not all the aristocracy, of course, were true musical connoisseurs, but quite a few not only understood what the musicians were trying to do, but participated in it themselves (Frederick the Great was perhaps the most notable example).
It was at this time that "classical" music began to undergo its characteristic development into a highly complex, carefully constructed genre. No doubt, the musicians attached to the courts of Europe competed with each other to entertain their patrons with ever more ingenious and elaborate aural structures; the skills of the performers became steadily more advanced, to the level that we still recognize as "virtuoso," and the bodies of musicians performing together became larger and more variegated, including more and more instruments. These included the brass family: the trumpets, which had for many centuries been so prominent a feature of the processional and military fanfares, inspiring the troops and terrifying the enemy; the French horns, developed from the hunting horns used during royal hunts, and the trombones, first used to add a note of grandeur to elaborate ecclesiastical music.
In this process, "classical" music became more and more professional, requiring high degrees of talent to compose and perform (and considerable time and effort on the part of listeners to learn how to appreciate). Thus, it began to take on another characteristic that has persisted to our time: its "upper-class," remote-from-the-common-folk nature. To be sure, in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, it began to break out of the palace. Key figures in this process were Handel and Haydn, who began to compose music for public concerts (compared to them, Mozart remained primarily a patron-supported artist, though if he had lived longer it is hard to doubt that he would have participated in this development.)
But the supreme example of the new concert composer was of course Beethoven. At the beginning of his career, he was also supported by noble patrons, but he belonged to the generation of artists who were inspired by the French Revolution, and his development more and more followed two paths: popular works that could inspire and arose the masses, on one hand, and ever more elaborate and advanced experimental work on the other. The former works tended to be written for large forces -- orchestra, orchestra and soloists, and of course his only opera, Fidelio, that passionate paean to liberation from aristocratic tyranny. The latter ones were primarily pieces of chamber music: string quartets and piano sonatas, intended to be performed for the very few "expert" listeners who could understand them. The Ninth Symphony could be seen as combining both of these tendencies: it was undoubtedly a popular success (to the extent that the theme of its last movement was chosen as the "national anthem" of the European Union, it was famously the musical accompaniment of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, and it has become an essential part of the New Year's festivities in Japan), but it also included a number of Beethoven's trademark late-period innovations, especially the introduction of voices into a symphony for the first time.
I do not want to go into the history of European classical music after Beethoven in detail here, but suffice it to say that the characteristics of the genre that were established by his career, regarded since his death as very close to the ideal model of a classical musician, have held sway until perhaps our own time. The institution of the classical music concert was based economically, of course, on the economic power of the new ruling class, the bourgeoisie. They constructed the concert halls, paid for the performances, and idolized the virtuosos like Chopin, Liszt, and Paganini. As the Baroque represented the aural self-glorification of the aristocracy, nineteenth-century "classical music," which lives on in all its glory as the "crystallized music" of Eatock, is the self-glorification of the capitalist class. (A fascinating topic in this connection is the economic interpretation of Wagner's Ring cycle, but that will have to wait for a possible later entry.)
To a large extent, I think, the travails and interesting new possibilities of today's "classical music" can be understood as reflecting the economic and political situation of capitalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But more detail about this will also need to be filled in later, since this entry has already become too long. But we can sum up the argument so far this way: the "elitist," "petrified," "rich-folks plaything" characterization of classical music which is often heard, especially, unfortunately, from the left, has a certain amount of truth to it, and this truth can be understood fairly easily from the history I have outlined. On the other hand, and notwithstanding that the "crystallized" portion of the repertoire was created by dead, white, males (by and large), it contains some of the most glorious art that has ever been made by human beings, and deserves to be preserved for that reason alone.
In addition, it is -- believe it or not -- enjoyable and even fun to perform and listen to! One of the main ways I think living classical music will be sustained in the future, as I will argue in another entry, is by a revival of the tradition of amateur performance, which was almost entirely killed by the development of recordings but seems to be coming back, at least to a slight degree. But it cannot be denied that one great factor standing in the way of classical music achieving greater popularity is that it developed to such a high level of complexity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as mentioned above, that it really takes some study for a listener to make much sense of it. Thus, it will never be "popular" in the sense that the more accessible forms of music are. But that too is a point I will develop later on.
Posted: Sun - May 29, 2005 at 03:19 PM | |
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Published On: Dec 09, 2005 10:19 PM
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