What should we call classical music?

Everyone can agree that the term “classical music” is silly, unless we’re specifically talking about European music of the Classical period.

The Mozart family played actual Classical music

It’s incorrect to call Baroque or Romantic or modernist music “classical,” even though we all colloquially do, to the annoyance of the classical tribe. It makes even less sense to call the music of Steve Reich or Julia Wolfe “classical.” So what should we call it?

Wikipedia lists some commonly used alternatives: Western art music, formal music, serious music, erudite music, or legitimate music. Those are all equally horrible terms, implying as they do that things like jazz and rock are not art, or formal, or serious, or erudite, or legitimate. You sometimes hear the term “concert music,” which is even dumber. For the more recent stuff, we have contemporary music, or new music, which are as bad as “art music.” Then there’s “modern classical music,” which makes no sense.

Craig Havighurst recently proposed that we use the term “composed music,” because it’s descriptive, non-judgmental, and broad enough to encompass everything we currently gather under the classical umbrella.

The ramifications of laying that term over and around the beleaguered term Classical Music could be profound. Baggage of history, class and race is swept away. The awkwardness of there being a Classical Period in Classical Music becomes moot. In a radio context, the music would no longer come across as an oldies format but as a vibrant art form, with Mozart and Jennifer Higdon and Chopin and John Luther Adams getting equal billing and stature.

I’m on board with all of this. Unfortunately, Havighurst falls right back into the reflexive snobbishness that he’s trying to repair.

The general public won’t initially know what we’re talking about when we talk about Composed Music, but that’s a good thing. It’s a chance to re-introduce and refresh the very idea of music made for careful listening and refined expression in a fast-changing and jaded world.

Right, because there isn’t careful listening or refined expression in other kinds of music. Gotcha.

Composed Music’s primary virtue is its blunt veracity. It is what it says it is: works by a singular mind, fixed and promulgated in written form… Composed Music covers everybody and every work we’ve ever described as Classical Music, plus anything written in the 20th and 21st century, right up through right now, without privileging any era or style.

The “blunt veracity” part is only true if we’re equating composition with notated works. Is that right? I get called a “composer” even though I rarely notate anything. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of notated music that we don’t usually think of as “classical,” like showtunes and big-band jazz.

The second argument for Composed Music is that it emphasizes the actual creator of the music, giving credit where it’s due in an era when the general public has been conditioned to associate works with performers. We will of course continue to hold up musicians, ensembles and conductors on their own terms and recognize their interpretive and musical brilliance. But the reason those people get up in the morning and perfect their artistry is ultimately to hack into the mind of a composer through the historic invention that is the composed score.

I’m not a classical musician, so I can’t say whether or not this is true. But okay.

In the concert hall (or appropriately hip alternative venue) the air shimmers with the sounds originally imagined by the composer in the silence of his or her studio, and the composer’s instructions are the one non-negotiable part of the experience.

This description, again, would seem to include Duke Ellington and Andrew Lloyd Webber too, but again, okay.

Composers have been rock stars in the past and they should be again.

Now we’ve departed from a discussion about musical genre and strayed into the tired old “people like the wrong music” trope. If composers want to be “rock stars”, all they have to do is write music that meets the emotional needs of more humans. It’s not hard, just try to sound more like Michael Jackson. Being liked by a mass audience is very remote from the concerns of the “serious” composers I’ve met.

Finally, the term has more poetry and resonance than might be apparent at first blush. The related word composure describes well the formality and focused attention that’s at the core of how so-called Classical Music has been performed and received for centuries, something that’s decidedly not broken.

This makes sense, on its face, except for the fact that back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “classical” concerts were rowdy and informal events, not at all like the secular religious services they are today.

Composed Music honors and thrives on active, engaged listening.

Uh huh. As opposed to all the other kinds of music.

It distinguishes itself from all music appropriate for a party or a free-speech atmosphere and invokes a contract among composer, artist and audience. We collectively conspire for silence, which is this art form’s canvass, blank page or dark theater. To grasp and feel Composed Music, the audience has to compose itself, and it’s nice to be reminded of that.

Again, this is at odds with the history of the music, but it’s an accurate enough description of the present.

Objections? I suppose that some will assert that all music is composed. Somebody fixes all those beats and notes and vocals in every pop record. Jazz tunes start with a fixed melody written down on staff paper. Electronica is made by musical minds consciously shaping timbre, texture, dynamics and the arc of a musical experience. Yeah, but no.

Wow, what a sophisticated argument.

My concept of Composed Music is limited to music that begins with musical notation, conventional or otherwise, and a composer’s intent that the music be performed as written, while allowing for and expecting the traditional and well-understood breathing room we call interpretation.

This also describes the music of Billy Joel.

We who cherish profound, challenging, complex music are facing a monumental task of the ‘turning an aircraft carrier’ variety.

Hey classical tribe! If you want to stop feeling neglected by a hostile mass audience, try not using language like this. Implying that everyone else’s music isn’t profound, challenging, or complex is a bad look.

Steve Reich’s preferred term is the best I’ve heard by far: “notated music.” It doesn’t make any assumptions about the nature of composition, or the audience’s state of mind. It still leaves open the problem of how you describe Andrew Lloyd Webber, but no genre descriptor is perfect. What do you say, music world? Can we get together on notated music?

17 thoughts on “What should we call classical music?

  1. “This makes sense, on its face, except for the fact that back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “classical” concerts were rowdy and informal events, not at all like the secular religious services they are today.”

    This is really interesting, along with the Western-specific idea of “silent, seated devotion” you mention in a previous comment. Where can I read more about the social history of classical music and how this changed over time?

  2. “This makes sense, on its face, except for the fact that back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “classical” concerts were rowdy and informal events, not at all like the secular religious services they are today.”

    This is really interesting, especially when thinking about how that evolved into the “silent and seated form of devotion” you wrote about in a previous comment. Where else can I read more about this history?

  3. Here’s a problem with calling it “notated music”: Let’s say I choose to freely improvise in the key of C, making an effort to play in the style of a Mozart sonata. If I were successful, a casual listener might say that I am playing “classical music”, but am I playing “notated music”?

    • Yeah, like I said, no genre descriptor is perfect. That said, how many classical musicians can improvise like Mozart? It’s a strange edge case.

  4. Rarely mentioned but worth a thought: The choice of instruments maps neatly on the musical style we intuitively lump together as a category. I’d say that within seconds a typical listener decides on category perceived based simply on instruments used. This indicates that intuitive categorization proceeds by historical period. The violin and the piano with occasional horns are to ‘classical’ what the electric guitar, bass and the drums are to ‘pop/rock’, while ‘jazz’ is usually brass based with acoustic bass and drums added. As soon as you switch some instruments out, you get from your ‘core’ to the ‘periphery’. Say Pat Metheny or the ‘Dead can’t be pure jazz since they’re guitar centric. Meanwhile if you use the instruments of a particular category, you are perceived as one of them. Cage is ‘classical’-ly simply because he uses the piano.

    • This is mostly true, but there are too many edge cases for it to be a foolproof system. Wes Montgomery and Charlie Christian are squarely in the center of jazz, while the gnarlier Coleman and Coltrane music isn’t. There’s a substantial amount of Cage music that uses totally non-classical sounds: radios, turntables, etc.

  5. Maybe there’s no one right word for this kind of music because it’s not just one kind of music. Everything from madrigals to grand opera, from chamber music to orchestral symphonies, gets filed under the label of classical, with a few outliers like flamenco and marches included as a courtesy.
    Imagine a course in non-classical music, where everything from bluegrass to jazz, from barbershop quartets to Indian raga, is included in the curriculum as if it were all one category. What would the mot juste for that course be?

  6. I’ve always liked Robert Ashley’s tongue-in-cheek description: If it’s under five minutes, it’s pop; if it’s over five minutes, it’s classical. But, yeah, I think we can talk about notated music. I do think there’s room for talking about how we use the music (which most classical folk abhor, unfortunately), which Ashley also had a good description for, which you hit upon above: devotional music. Not that you can’t devote yourself to any music, but the idea that you just sit and let it wash over you, as opposed to shakin’ your groove thing (also a necessary kind of music).

    • I’m so glad you brought up the concept of “devotion.” This idea that true devotion only happens when you’re seated and silent is peculiar to Western European cultures. In traditional African cultures, you practice devotion through dancing, drumming, singing, and so on. You can see that same idea at work in black churches in America — the congregation is on their feet and grooving. I think the reason that the world is currently so much more enthusiastic about African-descended music (e.g. hip-hop) than European-descended (e.g. classical) is that we yearn for that more active, social form of devotion. Our lives are too much about sitting silently; the last thing we need is to do that outside of our jobs.

  7. I think I just think that’s where adjectives become useful. Cage is, then, avant-garde classical. I’m not sure Cage is much further from Mozart than Cecil Taylor is from Bix Beiderbecke.

    It’s interesting, certainly, that a lot of musicians in what I’d call classical music are ditching the term — people within the field are, in many cases, feeling the same itch you are.

  8. I still call it all “classical” music, qualifying it as chamber, minimalist, etc., and usually some combination. The term “new music” has been used a lot for so long that the “new”ness of it has become all the more confusing, and contains some of the snobbery you mention. I see the term “classical” as a tradition. Some call it “academic,” but that always feels derogatory in its own way, as if it’s “academic” in terms of being apart from daily “real person” life, rather than being about study and legacy and apprenticeship. Bach would probably find Michael Nyman more familiar than, say, Bill Haley would find Jane’s Addiction, but we still call both the latter rock.

    • None of the top-level music genre names withstand too much scrutiny. I mean, what does the word “jazz” even mean at this point? “Rock” and “electronic” are just as confused. But fuzzy though those terms are, at least they have an easily identified center and periphery. We can probably all agree that Charlie Parker is in the center of jazz, that Pat Metheny is a little off-center, and that the Grateful Dead are way out in the periphery. But with classical, it’s harder. Are Mozart and John Cage both supposed to fall within the same descriptive term? They both wrote scores, but that’s where the similarity ends.

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