Ludwig van Beethoven, whose whole adult life was shaped by the turmoil of the French Revolution and its aftermath, took this style to its furthest point. We can hear the “storm and stress” artistic style associated with the period of the American and French Revolutions manifest itself in the increasingly dramatic tension in the music of Bach’s sons and Joseph Haydn. Musical form and style also closely matched the social transformations wrought by the birth of capitalism. Figures such as the violinist Niccolò Paganini, the pianist Franz Liszt, and the singer Jenny Lind became rich and famous touring the world and giving concerts backed by publicity campaigns. Musicians set up many of the major orchestras still in existence, such as the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Boston Symphony, with the support of private capital and the sustenance of paying audiences.Īround the same time, the phenomenon of the celebrity performer arrived. By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many great opera houses and concert halls were being built, and orchestras were created with the backing of commercial enterprises.įor example, the first major concert hall in London was the Hanover Square Rooms, which the Italian entrepreneur Sir John Gallini built and ran with the composers Johann Christian Bach (son of Johann Sebastian) and Carl Friedrich Abel. Johann Sebastian Bach, although he was employed by churches, had the status of an artisan, and frequently took private commissions to write works. The birth of opera in seventeenth-century Venice was mainly a commercial venture, in a city rich from trade. The rise of the middle classes, and the expansion of leisure time available to them, conditioned the emergence of classical music. For most of the medieval period, music was reserved for religious services, holiday dances, or the occasional visit of a troubadour. The rise of the middle classes, and the expansion of leisure time available to them and to the upper classes of their societies, conditioned the emergence of classical music. However, since “classical music” is such a widely recognized term, I shall use it interchangeably with “European music.” The Birth of European Music We can also better understand the rise and fall of this musical genre. If we understand it in those terms, it becomes much easier to see what all the composers I mentioned above have in common. More accurately, although less elegantly, we should think of it as the European/Western bourgeois tradition. It would perhaps be better if, instead of speaking about “classical music,” we referred instead to a tradition of European music. Yet they will sit together under the letter “S” in most classical music shops. If you were to listen to two piano works composed within a few years of each other - for example, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I-XI (1952–56) and Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues (1950–51) - it would be very hard to discern what they have in common stylistically. There is no single form or style that we can associate with classical music, even within the same period, let alone over the course of centuries. I can think of songs by the Beatles that match up to Franz Schubert’s work in their intensity and complexity of emotion and style. By the same token, there are many pieces from other genres that are very serious. Plenty of “classical music” is humorous or even downright silly, from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s A Musical Joke (1787) to György Ligeti’s Aventures (1962–63). It is not that it is a uniquely serious music. What distinguishes it from jazz, rock, hip hop, or any other genre? One of the problems in discussing what has happened to classical music is identifying what we mean by the term. Capitalism first created the space in which such music could flourish, and then took it away, leaving behind a frozen, formalized tradition. This is not the fault of individual musicians: the development of their art is inseparable from wider social and political trends. Over the last century, classical music has grown increasingly estranged from a mass audience or popular musical forms, retreating into an elitist silo.
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