Will classical music be the new rock'n'roll? Martin Kettle, upon reading a new book by South African scholar Peter Van der Merwe, seems to think it just might be.
But at the moment, it's very much in the doldrums. In the 18th, 19th and into the early 20th centuries, classical music was the most significant music in western culture. But somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, classical music took a dramatic wrong turning:
At the start of the 21st century, we can see what went wrong more clearly. What went wrong was western European modernism. Modernism is a huge, varied and complex phenomenon, and it took on different qualities in different national cultures. But an essential feature, especially as Van der Merwe argues it, was to turn music decisively towards theory - often political theory - and away from its popular roots.The pioneer figure was Arnold Schoenberg, with his theory of the emancipation of dissonance (which, as Van der Merwe cleverly points out, also implied the suppression of consonance). But it was after Schoenberg's death, in the period 1955-80, that his ideas achieved the status of holy writ.
The upshot was a deliberate renunciation of popularity. The audience that mattered to modernists (even the many who saw themselves as socialists) ceased to be the general public and increasingly became other composers and the intellectual, often university-based, establishment that claimed to validate the new music, not least through its influence over state patronage. Any failure of the music to become popular was ascribed not to the composer's lack of communication but the public's lack of understanding.
Into the void came first Jazz, then Rock, which gave the public what they were no longer getting from classical music. The sorts of people who might been writing symphonies and operas had they been born a century earlier instead gave us some of the rock canon of the past half-century.
Article comments
1 - Bruce Kratofil
I dunno, classical music hasn't been the same since Mozart died.
2 - scott
I think classical music is great.
3 - Marty Thau
Interesting premise but unlikely. Anyone care to wager on that?
4 - Aaman
Yngwie Malmsteen perhaps presaged this with his "Concerto" album for orchestra and electric guitar - then again, those were just his classical music roots at work.
The only way orchestras are going to become rock'n'roll worthy is if they clear out that mosh pit in front of them.
5 - Tim Hall
The trouble with Yngwie Malmsteen's "Concerto" album is that it's complete and utter crap. And Deep Purple did the same thing (and produced a listenable result!) two decades earlier.
6 - SFC SKI
Classical music can have a real power in a live setting with a full orchestra, in any case I think it is like conmparing apples and oranges, and a love of one does not make appreciation of the other mutually exclusive.
Rock will never die, just as classical, folk, or jazz haven't died off despite being overshadowed by another more popular or modern form.
7 - Dave Gilbert
To see young people revolt against a stagnating entertainment scene by turning to an earlier musical genre would be bizarre and unprecedented. It seems more likely that rock is on the verge of another wave of innovation.
8 - Shark
Just a few thoughts:
¥ most people are exposed to "classical" music through film -- which leads me to:
¥ The current crop of 'classical' masters who will be 'remembered' and played often in the future will come from film, which is 'the new church' when it comes to music patronage. (Star Wars, Titanic, et al are as ubiquitous as Beethoven and Mozart in the contemporary reportoire of most orchestras.)
¥ Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern were crap. Still are, always will be. And no more than a silly footnote in the history of music. Future historians will say "What were they thinking!?"
¥ re: Malmsteen, et al -- the classically trained rock "composer" has a long history of producing mediocre to really bad shit. And I believe Keith Emerson did it before Deep Purple, but either way, Malmsteen was definitely in diapers at the time.
re: "...I haven't heard anything much in the past few years that could not have been released two decades earlier."
• We're living in a post-post modern world: maybe for the first time in history, one can truly say "It's all been done before." -- *because it has.
*And please don't dispute this, people: I can prove it with a pencil and paper.
9 - Tim Hall
Shark: The current crop of 'classical' masters who will be 'remembered' and played often in the future will come from film, which is 'the new church' when it comes to music patronage.
Very true; future generations will probably consider the likes of John Williams and Enno Morricone to be among the most significant late 20th century composers.
One point from the original article is that 'classical' music continually borrowed elements from popular genres (and there was probably similar borrowing going the other way) but in the last century this stopped happening. In recent years, 'High Art' and 'Popular' music seemed to inhabit separate universes that don't acknowledge the existance of the other; any cross-fertilisation of ideas tend to get frowned upon (look at the utter distain in which prog-rock is held in many rock circles, for example)
10 - Mark Saleski
getting new music out there in the orchestral realm is really tough.
there's a reason why new pieces are programmed between old favorites, because if they played them last a boatload of people would walk out after the second part.
kinda sad.
11 - Eric Olsen
excellent point about film music being popular and near-ubiquitous, but isn't it too programmatic to be compared with the abstract aesthetics of classical?
12 - Mark Saleski
that's hard to say.
yes & no.
i mean, i the score for american beauty is just fantastic. i like it so much that in my mind there's no attachment at all to the film.
13 - JR
Opera music is programmatic, particularly Wagner.
14 - Eric Olsen
good point, I suppose film scores, like operas, have favorite segments and melodies filter through and become popular of their own accord, apart from the film
15 - godoggo
I love some classical. It may once have been more popular than it is now, but it was never really a popular music in the sense that rock'n'roll is, or swing was. Classical has always depended financially on the elite.
Well, I love classical music.
"Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern were crap." Whatever you may think of their chosen directions, they were all three extraordinarily skilled composers, unlike John Cage, say, or Phillip Glass. I happen to find Schoenberg's Moses and Aron quite beautiful. If your local library has a copy, I'd suggest that you, er, check it out.
BTW a really thought-provoking article about Cage and Babbitt, which I've bookmarked even though I dislike both composers, is at http://www.bostonreview.net/BR25.5/tymoczko.html
16 - godoggo
disregard the redundancy
17 - godoggo
And another thing, in case anybody's still following (not that the lack of an audience is something that I much concern myself with; dig my musical tastes): one reason I pseuso-linked to that Cage/Babbitt article is that it's relevant to Shark's comment; it discusses in a scholarly way not why serial music is "crap" so much as why serialism is, oh, let's say "gobbledygook" " that's how I remember Wendy Carlos characterizing it in one interview, wherein she noted that it was an attempt at a mathematical approach to musical composition, and that she was quite well-schooled in both math and music (indeed, she was [apparently " see the following sentence] quite skilled in serial composition, as she demonstrated in a thing (s)he wrote called "Pompous Circumstances" from the "Walter Carlos By Request" album. The salient (I'll just pretend that I actually know what that word means) point in the article was that, whereas trained musicians can tell by ear whether a composition follows the rules of counterpoint, but not the rules of serialism. The thing, though, is that Schoenberg himself was well aware that the rules he'd invented (in contrast to the rules of counterpoint, which had developed through the intuitive leaps of several generations of musicians, culminative of course with Bach) were pretty arbitrary; he considered it a "private system," and I seem to remember reading somewhere that he refused to teach it, although the evidence of Webern and Berg would seem to contradict my memory. Whatever. The thing is (forget what I said was the thing before; this here really is the thing) that, however arbitrary the rules may be, they can certainly be used to create good music, as long as the composer is skilled and, more important, inspired, as is proved, says me, by Moses un Aron.
Speaking of atonal stuff, I totally dig on
Lutoslawski. Everybody needs to hear my boy Witold. Suggest starting with the early tonal stuff, and working one's way forward and outward.
18 - godoggo
omit "whereas." Henceforth, I shall let my sloppiness stand, but not a moment before henceforth.
19 - godoggo
Oh, and another thought regarding the movie music question; this strikes me as the flipside of the various silly isms in other arts that appeared during the last century, wherein practically anything, ranging from the functional "art" of the worlds of advertising or comic books to vacuum cleaners or basketballs (which I remember from a 60 Minutes debunking) becoming high art simply by being displayed in a museum. I think both phenomena, for better or worse, are evidence of the end of an era, lasting just a few centuries out of human history, which saw the reverence for "great" as opposed to "good" art, characterized by singular masterworks ideally standing apart from any exterior function. Movies remind me of those medieval cathedrals we learned about in school, collective works of kindasorta practical art covered with little bits of all kinds of good stuff.
20 - John McDowall
Can anyone remember the name of that 4 piece band of women. They played popular classical music on ultra modern styled classical instruments.
21 - Aaman
Bond
22 - Tim Hall
Bond were as manufactured and plastic as any boy band.
What does anyone think of Apocalyptica? Having seen them live, although their music is played on cellos, it's very rock'n'roll.