Over at the other blog, I recently posted about the top 10 classical albums on the Billboard charts. The charts seem to contain little that I would call "classical," but I wouldn't be so quick to call them "popular," either. I've been thinking a lot about this topic over the last week or so, and it seems like it's on the top of the minds of others, too. My hope is to write a series of posts examining this issue from several different angles over the next week or so. Enjoy!
First, I would like to go on the record as saying that categories in general are never as cut-and-dried as we want them to be. As human beings, we have an innate desire (need?) to classify things, to group things that are alike. I suspect that such a strategy eases our cognitive loads; we don't need to remember individual dog breeds, we can just lump everything with dog-like characteristics together and create a prototypical dog. Items within a category are considered to be more alike than different; items in different categories are perceived as more different than alike. This is called categorical perception (a nice overview of the concept can be found here).
Apropos the present discussion, Billboard, iTunes, record stores (remember them?), and individuals make these same/different judgments regarding music all of the time. I suspect that most people, in answer to the question "what kind of music do you like?" respond with the name of a category: classical, rap, country. We group music on the basis of musical features: if a song has these features, then it belongs in this category. In order to study these categories, we must abstract those features of the music that bestow its categorical membership. In a very broad--perhaps naive--sense, this is easy to do. In the non-musical world, ask someone what makes a dog different from a car, and you'll probably be met with laughter. Most people might react similarly when asked to say what makes popular music different from so-called classical music. Classical music, they might say, doesn't have words (or the words are in a different language); it uses an orchestra; it's long; etc. Popular music uses electric/amplified instruments, has words, songs are about three minutes long, etc.
If we dig a little deeper, we see that there are a variety of possible musical features. We might talk about individual instruments (what's the difference between the violin, a "classical" instrument, and the fiddle, a "country" instrument?), harmonies, melodies, rhythm and meter--all of the traditional elements of an introduction to music theory class. Classical aficionados might argue that the harmonies and melodies of popular music are far less sophisticated than those of classical music; popular music fans could respond by asking them to commit even the simplest popular tune into standard musical notation.
We can step back a bit from the purely musical features and talk about subject matter and lyrics. Just as there is popular music in every language, there is classical music in every language. Heavy metal often deals with death, the occult, and other macabre topics; these topics were standard fare for 19th-century composers like Schubert, too. Contemporary classical music deals with hot-button political issues like the death penalty, terrorism, and homosexuality just as popular music does.
We can look at the social and cultural aspects of music as well. The stereotypical audience for a classical concert comprises a sea of elderly, well-dressed, wealthy people who can afford a ticket to the opera. The stereotypical popular concert-goer is young, humbly dressed, and... well, can afford a ticket to the concert (which actually probably cost more than a ticket to the opera, believe it or not). Both populations buy CDs, or download mp3s; they read about their favorite artists; watch videos and so on.
In summary, given my comparisons above, what really distinguishes popular music from classical music? Both are musically sophisticated (or, quite simple), deal with the same subject matter, and are produced and consumed in much the same way. Perhaps the distinction is along the lines of Potter Stewart's famous definition of hardcore pornography: "I'll know it when I [hear] it." Tune in later for the next installment...
First, I would like to go on the record as saying that categories in general are never as cut-and-dried as we want them to be. As human beings, we have an innate desire (need?) to classify things, to group things that are alike. I suspect that such a strategy eases our cognitive loads; we don't need to remember individual dog breeds, we can just lump everything with dog-like characteristics together and create a prototypical dog. Items within a category are considered to be more alike than different; items in different categories are perceived as more different than alike. This is called categorical perception (a nice overview of the concept can be found here).
Apropos the present discussion, Billboard, iTunes, record stores (remember them?), and individuals make these same/different judgments regarding music all of the time. I suspect that most people, in answer to the question "what kind of music do you like?" respond with the name of a category: classical, rap, country. We group music on the basis of musical features: if a song has these features, then it belongs in this category. In order to study these categories, we must abstract those features of the music that bestow its categorical membership. In a very broad--perhaps naive--sense, this is easy to do. In the non-musical world, ask someone what makes a dog different from a car, and you'll probably be met with laughter. Most people might react similarly when asked to say what makes popular music different from so-called classical music. Classical music, they might say, doesn't have words (or the words are in a different language); it uses an orchestra; it's long; etc. Popular music uses electric/amplified instruments, has words, songs are about three minutes long, etc.
If we dig a little deeper, we see that there are a variety of possible musical features. We might talk about individual instruments (what's the difference between the violin, a "classical" instrument, and the fiddle, a "country" instrument?), harmonies, melodies, rhythm and meter--all of the traditional elements of an introduction to music theory class. Classical aficionados might argue that the harmonies and melodies of popular music are far less sophisticated than those of classical music; popular music fans could respond by asking them to commit even the simplest popular tune into standard musical notation.
We can step back a bit from the purely musical features and talk about subject matter and lyrics. Just as there is popular music in every language, there is classical music in every language. Heavy metal often deals with death, the occult, and other macabre topics; these topics were standard fare for 19th-century composers like Schubert, too. Contemporary classical music deals with hot-button political issues like the death penalty, terrorism, and homosexuality just as popular music does.
We can look at the social and cultural aspects of music as well. The stereotypical audience for a classical concert comprises a sea of elderly, well-dressed, wealthy people who can afford a ticket to the opera. The stereotypical popular concert-goer is young, humbly dressed, and... well, can afford a ticket to the concert (which actually probably cost more than a ticket to the opera, believe it or not). Both populations buy CDs, or download mp3s; they read about their favorite artists; watch videos and so on.
In summary, given my comparisons above, what really distinguishes popular music from classical music? Both are musically sophisticated (or, quite simple), deal with the same subject matter, and are produced and consumed in much the same way. Perhaps the distinction is along the lines of Potter Stewart's famous definition of hardcore pornography: "I'll know it when I [hear] it." Tune in later for the next installment...