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List of classical and art music traditions

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This article is about classical music as opposed to popular or folk musics. For articles on the classical music of Western cultures, such as Beethoven's symphonies, see European classical music; for the more restricted usage that refers to the period and style typified by Haydn and Mozart, see Classical music era.


Classical music is music considered classical, as sophisticated and refined, in a regional tradition. The term "classical" has many connotations. The present page aims at distinguishing between the many meanings "classical" can have in the realm of music.

In the English language, the term "classical music" is a homophoric reference to European classical music and its derivative styles, and rarely used to refer to traditional musical styles, in the way it is presented here. More specifically, the term may refer to the Classical music era, a period in Europe roughly between 1740 and 1830 and which is characterised by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Josef Haydn.

List of classical music traditions

Here follows a non-limitative list of such "classical music" traditions:


By regional and cultural tradition

Every musical tradition has its classics, the pieces of music in that tradition that seem near to indestructible, or at least unavoidable when talking of that musical tradition.

Many musical traditions are linked to a region, that is, if the people making music in that tradition stay around in the same region, and if there are no significant ruptures in the musical tradition commonly associated to that region. Some examples include: Andalusian classical music, European classical music, Carnatic music, Korean court music, Laotian classical music, Vietnamese classical music.

In some cases a "classical music" tradition still has a geographical descriptor in its name, where the reference is still to the region of origin of that tradition, without defining where that tradition lives and is further developed, for example:

Other "classical music" traditions have no regional references any more in their name, but only refer to the cultural entity to which they belong, for example:

Most classical music traditions mentioned in the previous section had at least an early part of their historical development overlapping with the popular and folk music genres of their day. However, the term "classical music" is used to mark the distinction between those popular genres and classical musical genres made with increasing frequency from about 1790 onwards (van der Merwe 1989, p.17). This is for example the case when speaking about:

What makes popular music distinct? Peter van der Merwe (p.1) cites a more general case of timeliness: ease of modernity. For, in the early 20th century, "as long as" serious composers, "stuck to the diatonic scale...their music had a tiresome way of sounding as though it might have been written before 1900." Non-serious composers, "thought they continued to use those hoary old formulas, and yet somehow their music was of the twentieth century. No one could mistake a Noel Coward waltz for a Strauss one. Think what one might of Gershwin and Cole Porter, one could not accuse them of sounding like Schubert or Hugo Wolf, Massenet or even Puccini. As for jazz, it was as typical of the 1920s as cloche hats or bathtub gin."

Later (p.3), he describes that, "if history follows its usual course the popular idioms of today will become the learned idioms of tomorrow, and the antiquated academicism of the day after tomorrow."

Theodore Adorno would find this analysis jejune, for although limited in his ability to appreciate non-Western classical music (as seen from Adorno's confusions about Jazz, in which he seems to have confused with white American pop and Big Band), Adorno did not believe that traditions follow innovation in any regular or systolic way.

Twelve tone classical music was in fact highly not "popular" from its introduction at the beginning of the 20th century but (after repeated attempts to introduce "modern" classical music by Schoenberg, Berg or the easier to understand Stravinsky damaged the careers of several Western conductors including Serge Koussevitsky) this style is reaching limited popularity, because the experimentations in popular music, by diverse artists including David Bowie and Brian Eno, have increased the tolerance of classical audiences.

Mozart managed to be wildly popular with some of his contemporaries, so much so that The Magic Flute appears to have been a popular success. At the same time, other people preferred the more predictable music of Antonio Salieri. Then, Mozart appears to have survived the change of fashion attendant on Carl Maria von Weber and the waltz madness of the 1820s to become "Mozart", popular then and now with most classical audiences. Peter Shaffer only partly fictionalized this complex situation in his stageplay (later movie) Amadeus.

Today, commentators have noticed from sales records and attendance figures a striking decline in the always limited popularity of classical music. In the 1950s, most major and many mid-sized American cities supported one or two classical format stations but today, Chicago's WFMT is about the only major classical format station to remain; classical music is on life support on PBS in the US. So while the classical audience might tolerate Berg more, in absolute terms it shrinks.

In mainland China and Hong Kong, the definitely "classical" genre of Beijing's opera, and similar regional and provincial opera styles staged a comeback with middle aged and older audiences after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and greater official tolerance for artistic marketplaces. However, the appeal of "Chinese" opera remains limited to the older generation, and "artistic" youth who tend to migrate to Hong Kong. Public-service advertisements in Hong Kong, in fact, use characters from classical Chinese opera to represent street fraudsters as opposed to normal, honest people, where the stylized voice and gestures of the tricksters are opposed to a normal sale.

In India, while "Bollywood" music uses classical Indian motifs, it also has the pop music tendency seen in China and the USA to desensitize potential classical listeners to complex harmony and rythyms. It may be that in today's "fast paced" world, where the forced pace of life is reinterpreted as what its victims "want", the *raga* takes entirely too long to get under way to work.

Only Adorno's level of analysis can help us untangle these world complexities. That's because Adorno rejected as simplistic the idea that people in a music marketplace select what they "want" based on unquestionable desire. Adorno analyzed classical listenership into equal parts genuine appreciation and a desire for wealth to celebrate its superior taste (a consistent theme in classical music which has consistently created resistance in the fandom of other genres). Adorno infamously analyzed jazz into the "music of slaves" and while his essay On Jazz has been discredited, the American artist Robert Crumb, an amateur expert in American roots and blues music, shares Adorno's reservations about contemporary popular music.

Narrowly, music critics, whose narrowness is seen in the way that they tend to count themselves as genre fans (a jazz music critic being almost a separate species from a rock critic), tend to naturalize music such that "popularity" at some ahistorical moment is naturally followed by "academic" survival, as if the complex popularity of Mozart in 1780 is an identical phenomenon to the popularity of David Bowie in 1980.

As a Marxist, Adorno saw that "evolving productive forces" vector such that no such systolic return to the past can occur. In fact, Beethoven's Ninth symphony was presented along with several other works in a program overlong by today's standards, perhaps because as Adorno claimed that mechanical reproduction causes a form of musical ADD (attention deficit disorder).

At the same time, the presentation of the Ninth was probably laughably incompetent by today's standards. Several singers complained repeatedly about Beethoven's demands on their range and skill, the "original instruments" were probably inferior in volume, range and pitch because of the lack of central heating and air conditioning (giving the lie to any "original instruments" claim about their superiority as a form of truth), and we do know that the orchestra was barely able to follow Herr Beethoven, their deaf conductor.

Stunningly wrong On Jazz, Adorno nonetheless shows that we may not be able to understand classical music outside of the society that produces it. History never follows its usual course.

Adorno would be hard put to disambiguate "classical" from "popular" because he'd see that "popular" rigs the question. Beethoven in terms of gross sales over time, of sheet music, then 78 rpm records, then LP records, then CDs and now downloaded gives the Beatles a run for their money. Adorno would reject Brecht's "culture is dogshit" preference for the "popular" music of a Surabaya Johnny because if history is a vector then an era in which the "higher" was available to people who today feed on garbage is yet to come.

Classical music as the reference period of a musical tradition

In analogy to how in the Western world the "classical" period for art and architecture was defined as Greek and Roman antiquity, in music also a certain period in the evolution of a musical tradition can be marked as classical:

Cross-over classics

All the previous described classical music as deriving from, or living within a single tradition: of course also crossover genres can have their classics. For examples, see: Crossover music.

Other definitions of classical music

Classical music is sometimes defined as music produced in, or rooted in the traditions of art, ecclesiastical and concert music. A music is classical if it includes some of the following features: a learned tradition, support from the church or government, or greater cultural capital.

There are many definitions or criteria used to create specific lists of classical music traditions, most commonly including: the tradition must be fairly old, the tradition must possess some sort of notation, the tradition must require study or training to become an acceptable performer or composer. Lou Harrison, for instance, includes European classical music, Indian classical music, an Arabic tradition of classical music, and Chinese classical music. However, the most reliable indication that a tradition is a classical one is the self-identification as such by members of that tradition, for instance Ravi Shankar's questionable assertions that there are two superior musical traditions in the world, Indian classical music and European classical music.


Reference

  • van der Merwe, Peter (1989). Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0193161214.
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