What Is Classical Music?

For several days I have been thinking of getting into the fray over the issue of the future of classical music. The subject is of no small interest to me, since the station I manage plays "classical" music 24/7. And dispatches from the outside world keep coming in. Just last week, we learned that the CBC's classical service, Radio 2, is making major changes because "Half our audience....is now over 65....and we're not attracting new listeners into the service." More jazz programming will be added in hopes of broadening the appeal (hold that thought).

But I think I'll stay out of the debate over classical music's demise, at least for now. The job is already in far more capable hands than mind, especially those of Greg Sandow, whose blogging on the subject is far better informed, more stylish and even witty (is this man really a music critic?) than anything I could ever hope to write. So if you want to get into this particular discussion, hop on over to Greg's place and dig in.

Besides, I realized that I need to deal with a more fundamental question first: just what is classical music, anyway? A funny question, perhaps, for someone who, though musically uncredentialed, has listened to classical music all his life and toiled in the vineyards of classical radio off and on for more than 30 years. But the question is relevant, not only as a prerequisite for debating the issue above, but because stations like ours not infrequently take hits for broadcasting music that some members of the audience consider inappropriate because it is not, well... classical. Indeed, it is just such an incident that prompts this the thoughts that follow. Last Thursday, I think it was, we broadcast a local feature on WDAV that prompted something of an outcry (3 calls and e-mails is an outcry at your average classical station) because, horror of horrors, the music on the piece was frankly acknowledged to be jazz (see first paragraph above).

I just listened again, and I will admit that some of the music strayed into harmonic realms where Mozart would seldom, if ever have traveled. And one brief segment featured a saxophone! But I suspect the bigger sin was the frank label, "jazz," which host and guest attached to his compositions and performances. I am convinced that the first solo piano piece in the feature, at the very least, would have drawn no fire at all if it had simply been referred to as a "composition," and not wrapped in the mantle of jazz.

But I digress. What is classical music? Wikipedia has a pretty good definition, I think. I won't reprint it all, but you can read it here. I like the way it begins: "Classical music is a broad, somewhat imprecise term." Somewhat! The definition would seem to involve cultural factors almost as much as musical ones. We jokingly say that classical music is music written by dead white guys of European origin, but that's not so far off -- especially if they've been dead at least 100 years.

But there's a lot more to it than that, obviously. Classical music is serious music, written with the intent of creating works of art -- the antithesis of popular music. But wait -- in its time, much of what we call classical music was the popular music of its day. How are we to deal with that? According to Wikipedia, the term "classical music" didn't even exist prior to the 19th century, while the music which we so label today goes back roughly 1,000 years.

And then there's the troubling fact that a fair amount of music we consider classical is really quite close, even perilously close, to its origins in other genres. I think of Bartok and Kodaly lugging their huge, ungainly recording apparatus into the Hungarian countryside to faithfully capture the folk music of their day, and how Bartok later transcribed some of this music virtually note for note, magically transforming it from something quaint and rustic into Classical Music. I think of Bach copying an old drinking song ("Cabbage and Beets?!") for the Quodlibet in the Goldberg Variations. I think of the suite from West Side Story, music that is filled with jazzy popular tunes but worms its way into the classical canon because... well, because Bernstein was a classical musician; because Bernstein was the conductor of the New York Philharmonic; because we say it's classical, dammit.

And what are we to make of the likes of Gershwin? How do we get away with playing "Summertime" on a classical station? Rhapsody in Blue, etc.? And how in the world do we get away with playing Scott Joplin? (Well, sometimes we don't, which raises another troubling issue.)

And here in the opening years of the 21st Century, things are becoming more confusing still. What is that stuff that Yo Yo Ma is playing? Or Edgar Meyer? What are these consummate classical musicians doing slumming around in the music of the East, in the music of the Appalachians, in the music of Brazil? Is anything that comes out of these collaborations with like-minded musicians "Classical?"

What are we to make of it when Yo Yo Ma teams up with Allison Krauss, a bluegrass musician of all lowbrow things, to perform a stunningly beautiful version of "Simple Gifts," a Shaker hymn from the mid 19th century, treated most often as if it were folk music (but not overlooked by Aaron Copeland as a recurring theme in Appalachian Spring)? What are we to make of it when Anonymous Four, a quartet of conservatory-trained women who specialized in early music suddenly break out of the classical straitjacket and perform, among other examples of Americana, a heart-melting version of "Wondrous Love" -- yet another hymn from the mid 19th century performed most often these days -- when performed at all -- as a folk or bluegrass tune?

How are we to deal with the fact that in between pieces of sublime beauty, Mozart could write some pretty schlocky stuff to help pay the bills?

So back to the question that started all this: What is classical music? Here's what I imagine to be a rudimentary checklist: It has to have been written down, not improvised (we'll save a discussion of those pesky cadenzas for later); it must have been written with Serious Artistic Intent, even if stolen from a not-so-serious source; it must be played by someone labled a "classical musician" (like Wynton Marsalis?); it must use only acoustic instruments (unless belongs to that subcategory known as "New Music," in which case no one wants to hear it anyway); and ideally it should be perceived by the modern listener as "soothing" or "relaxing," even if the composer originally intended to scare the bejezus out of his (oh, yeah, that's more or less another criterion) contemporary audience, to incite them to revolution, to rouse powerful nationalistic emotions, to suck them into his personal traumas; and all manner of other non-so-soothing endeavors.

In the end, the simple answer to this question may be that classical music may be any music that someone the listener accepts as an authority has labeled "classical." Perhaps the reason WDAV gets away with playing some of the things I mentioned, and many other not-so-classical pieces that I didn't mention, is that many listeners are willing to grant us this authority (though a few emphatically are not). As I said earlier about the music that triggered all this, the sin may not have lain in the music that we played. The sin may have lain in the label, Jazz, that we so firmly applied.