by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
Classical music often enjoys a status of being complex, dignified, and asides from the popular excerpts of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Chopin served up time and time again, reserved for fit occasion. If someone wants to ‘get in’ to classical music, they have almost a thousand years of compositions. Looking back past the 18th century, the music becomes increasingly alien to contemporary sentiment. Bach stands as the last towering familiar figure, the last lighthouse, with Vivaldi twinkling nearby. We begin to meet sparseness of instrumentation, until further still, we meet the distant solemn voices of plainsong, or the Gregorian Chant.
It is common to contrast classical music with folk music. Until the last century, forms of folk music would’ve been what the majority of people would’ve heard. In those terms, pop music today is a kind of ‘new’ folk – no one says that because it’s too confusing. Big Bill Broonzy once said: ‘all music is folk music, I never seen no horse play music’.
He’s right, and folk traditions have bled into classical for some time; jigs, reels, and dances found their way into Beethoven and Haydn. Famous examples are of Dvorak using American and Czechian folk melodies to compose, as well as the influence of Hungarian folk music on Bela Bartok and Kodaly, a collector akin to the Grimms Brothers collection of folktales. Newer ‘folk’ traditions were also made use of: elements of jazz and ragtime are in Stravinsky and Shostakovich. The list is long.
The writer D.H. Lawrence collected folk music too. He thought Beethoven was overblown, too large and complex, and believed that folk music offered in its simplicity a real spontaneity of a people and their land. Compared in this way, we see the folk tune originating from nowhere, from anonymity, growing out just as the flora and fauna colour a landscape. If that is true, classical music becomes a deep meditation on sound, abstracted from earth, only held on by tradition, a sort of intellectual counterpart to the intuitive… but that is all conceptualising and not in the spirit of what music is.
The instinct for language is also the instinct for music. The French philosopher Jean Jacques Rosseau once imagined a primitive golden age where people communicated in music and things were perfectly understood. That age is far gone. Language is imperfect for true expression, even communication, as the psycho-linguists and philosophers would have us believe; music is imperfect for representation, hence their constant shifting, constant use of similar themes – we only create imperfections and use them as we can, leave off them as we will.
Listening to new (to your ears) music is similar to immersion in a foreign language. The abstracted quality of music often belies this point, but it is the same as listening to the rhythms of a foreign tongue. This goes someway to explaining why it is said that there is a national classical music. They say: Ralph Vaughan Williams ‘sounds’ English; Debussy is unmistakenly French; Brahms, Hungarian? No, German. Well, if they cannot be said to be national then it is common to bring out a quality: Bach is universal: mathematics and beauty; Mozart is polished, refined; Beethoven is a mountain range.
Folk music always has a subject. Most of Jazz has a subject. When Bach had to compose a piece every week for the church, he had a quasi-subject, but one that was justification enough to compose. A subject is forced onto music. It is instinct, or perhaps from long conditioning, that make a sound feel as though it represents a feeling or a subject. There is nothing sad or happy about a progression, nothing representative in conceptual terms, but it is almost unbearable to be able to actually think otherwise. Music is, after or before all, an experience and we do not experience without emotion, however dull.
It was late in the day of classical music that composers started using music as representation; tone poems, they are often called. Compositions were mostly named after musical forms and the key signature, and these forms were revolutionized again and again, until either not needed or because interest went in other directions. Musical forms, however, are still happily being written.
To my mind, there is nothing exclusive to classical music, especially in our times. One of its main virtues is its depth and journey of sound which it seems one often justifies by giving it a reference, sometimes as a formality, sometimes out of a true belief that the music is Roussean, is the perfect representation of some subject. Classical music is a tradition of Western culture… born out of antique mathematics and inspiration (knowing a scale doesn’t mean knowing how to craft a melody). They are also folk traditions that are abstracted, self-consciously engaged with and given another life. There is no need to distinguish between what is or is not more ‘intuitive’ or ‘national’. Music is music is music.
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The Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://www.carlkruse.com
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include No One’s Fool and Phantasia.
One of our other writers, Hazel Anna Rogers, wrote about the wonders of classical music in an earlier post and in another one of the Carl Kruse Blogs writer Deanna Balestra wrote on how classical music can improve your mental health.
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