Classical Music: A Beginner's Guide

Preface

What kind of book is this and who is it for? A ‘Beginner’s Guide’ it may be, but it won’t tell you where to begin. The fact that you’ve even picked up this book and started to read the Preface suggests that you’re not a complete beginner at all, that you’ve already begun to listen to, be curious about, or are involved at some level in playing or singing classical music. In that sense, you and I are engaged in the same quest – not just to know more about this massively diverse body of music, spanning some thousand years or more, but to try to understand it better. To that end, what I’ve offered in this book are some frameworks within which classical music might be better understood.

This is not a history of music, though my chapters divide along broadly historical lines. It is not an introduction to key composers, musical works or techniques, though plenty of these appear along the way. There are literally scores of books that will give you an overview of all of this, with glossy pictures of musical instruments, composers and their contemporaries. Some come with CDs of music examples. All of these have their value and use, so why read this one?

This one is primarily concerned with what music has meant to people – why it mattered so much at the time, and why it might still matter to us now. Rather than tell a story in which musical style ‘just changes’ over the centuries, as if composers simply got bored with the old ways, I have tried instead to give a sense of how music has related to some of the big ideas of Western experience – spirituality, human emotion, the invention of the new, the weight of history, the self-identity of individuals and nations. Huge claims have been made for the meaning of classical music, framed in terms of religion, philosophy, psychology or politics. At other times, it’s simply been taken as an innocent pleasure, a diversion or entertainment.

Talking about music is no substitute for listening to it. At the end of the book I have given a list of some key musical works that are either mentioned in the text or would illustrate the points I have tried to make. There are hundreds of other works that I might have suggested instead, so similar works by the same composers would do the job just as well if you find it difficult to get hold of the ones I’ve suggested. I have also recommended some books for further reading but these are best followed up in tandem with listening to the music. I have often found, with music that is new to me, that listening to it provokes questions, which sets me thinking and then reading, which sends me back to listen to the music again. It’s a never-ending process which, at best, continually enriches the experience of the music.

But there is no right way. Some of my most vivid musical encounters have been by accident and some of the music that haunts me now is music that a few years ago did nothing for me. There is little to be gained by trying to listen chronologically – like the man who tried to read the whole of ‘great’ literature starting methodically with authors beginning with ‘A’, you won’t get far. If I have any recommendation it is simply to follow your nose, stop at the places that interest you, but don’t be afraid of the unfamiliar. Life often seems too short to listen to music that isn’t immediately engaging; on the other hand, it’s too short not to.

1

What is classical music?

If you browse through the ‘classical’ section of a major music outlet (on the high street or online) you’re likely to find an eclectic collection of music – not just famous composers of the concert hall and opera house from the past few hundred years, but a host of lesser known figures and musical styles. For a start, you’ll find an extensive range of music stretching way back through the Renaissance and medieval period to the simple unaccompanied religious chants of the ninth century or even earlier; next to Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Puccini and Debussy, you’ll find music by Monteverdi, Palestrina, Machaut and Pérotin. At the other end of the historical spectrum, the ‘classical music’ section might include the music of film composers like John Barry or John Williams, songs drawn from pop and jazz idioms but performed by classical singers in orchestral arrangements, and a modernist avant-garde that sounds like it would be unlikely to appeal to the same people as Haydn or Schubert.

There is no simple definition of what constitutes classical music. The term refers to music drawn from over a thousand years of music history, from the medieval to the postmodern. It includes music written specifically for the concert hall but also music that was never intended for an audience. Though the best-known composers of the classical tradition were mostly working in Western Europe, today the story of classical music reaches across the globe. For many people, classical music is simply old music, yet many contemporary composers, writing in modern styles, see themselves as part of a continuing classical tradition. For some, classical music might be simply music for classically trained musicians – sung by choirs or played by the kind of acoustic instruments you find in orchestras. But the closer one looks the more elusive becomes any kind of definition. It’s not just music written by dead composers because it’s a living form; it doesn’t have any particular set of rules or conventions because composers have continually altered these throughout history; it’s not just music that takes itself seriously and calls itself ‘art’ because much of it was neither written nor performed in that way.

So how does over a thousand years of Western music come to be summed up by the term classical? What is there in common between the unaccompanied melodies sung by a few monks in empty chapels in the ninth century and a modern symphony written for an orchestra of a hundred musicians and performed to an audience of two thousand in the twenty-first century? A simple answer might be – not much. It quickly becomes clear that there are no firm definitions of classical music and it’s rather futile to look for them. In one sense, classical music is simply the music that is taken to be classical music. This is a useful definition because it underlines that the category is a cultural and historical one and therefore changeable; it has to do with how music is framed, thought about and used, rather than with some essential and mysterious ingredient that classical pieces possess and others do not.

Nor is the idea of a classical music unique to western Europe. Similar musical repertoires were developed in the court cultures of China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and India. The institutions of professional musicians, musical notation and fixed musical repertories ensured a kind of continuity and uniformity of practice over centuries that these traditions have in common. Such a music does not usually happen in a society dominated by the basic material demands of food and shelter. More often than not, what we call art has been the product of lives granted a level of freedom from the basic demands of subsistence. Art and music have flourished in those periods of history, and those parts of society, in which the luxury of free time and material wealth has allowed such a culture to take precedence over more material matters. In the medieval world, it was thus primarily in the closed communities of the church and monastery and royal courts that music, literature and learning were able to flourish. It was not until the eighteenth century that this situation changed to any great extent, and the rise of an economically independent middle class meant that music making and concert going became a public activity for anyone who cared to buy a ticket or take music lessons.

It is worth remembering that the idea of classical music widely accepted today did not exist until about 300 years ago. Performing music in concert halls to a paying audience, as something inherently pleasurable and significant, was pretty much unheard of until the eighteenth century and not widely established until the nineteenth. The concert hall, the audience, and the idea of ‘masterpieces’ of classical music, were all effectively invented during the course of the eighteenth century – in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and other European cities. Much of the music that is now performed in public concerts was not composed for that purpose. The cantatas of J. S. Bach, for example, were written to be sung in religious services at the Church of St Thomas in Leipzig where Bach was cantor. These pieces were part of weekly worship, and included chorales (hymns) for the congregation to join in with the singing. Sing along during a modern concert hall performance of one of these works today and you’re likely to be told to shut up.

Recording

Music that was originally written for the concert hall may today appear on the soundtrack to an advert or film. Conversely, music originally written for films is sometimes performed live in the concert hall. Rather than being bewildered by all this, it’s probably best to accept that since the whole idea of a classical music is itself a historical invention, it’s not surprising to find that it is still changing today. Nothing has changed music over the last century more radically than the invention and dissemination of recording technologies. Though Thomas Edison developed the phonograph in 1877, and wax cylinders were used as early as the 1880s for recording music, commercial recordings of music were not widely available until after the First World War. From the mid-1980s onwards, the vinyl disc gradually gave way to the new technology of the CD, yet just a decade later the MP3 file was already displacing the CD as the favoured way to handle recorded music. Today, children have more music stored on their phones, ipods or computers than would have been contained on all the yards of library shelves of a proud ‘record collector’ of the twentieth century.

The impact of recording technologies on how we think about and use music has been huge. Without doubt it has been the single most important historical shift in music since the development of the idea of the public concert in the eighteenth century. Before recording, music was a social event – it involved one or more people coming together to make music. Music lasted for as long as they sang or played and then it was over. Music happened only when and where there were people to make it. Before the modern concert took off, music tended to be restricted to compositions by recent or living musicians, probably working in the locality; it was rare to hear music from a distant time, place or culture. Even when music became professionalized, listening to music generally involved going to a specific venue, at a specific time, to hear musicians create a one-off event.

Recording changed all of that. Today’s technology makes almost all the world’s music instantly and constantly available to anyone with access to simple and cheap electronic gadgets for playing it. Music thus floats free of any specific occasion or venue, any particular time or place. It no longer has to be associated with a particular audience or group of musicians. For the first time, music (any music) can be an entirely personal affair. This is one of the reasons that the ‘classical’ label becomes harder to pin down. One of its distinctive aspects – a performance space defined by concert halls and opera houses – is dissolved by digital recording formats that means all music, classical music included, can become a personal soundtrack for commuting, exercising, shopping, or whatever you choose. The ubiquity of music as recorded sound means that it’s very easy to overlook perhaps the most definitive aspect of the classical music tradition – the fact that it is a written or notated music. Though classical music may lack a precise definition today and mean quite different things to different people, at its heart is the idea of a music that has survived down the centuries because it was written down in some form. The origins of what music historians think of as classical music is more or less contemporary with the origins of a system of musical notation. Put very simply, the history of classical music in all its varied forms, is the history of a tradition that grew out of the possibilities of musical notation.

Notation

To a non-musician, notation might seem no more than an aid to memory, the only way of ‘making a record’ of how a piece goes, before the invention of electronic means of recording. This was certainly the original impetus behind the development of notational systems from about the ninth century onwards. Those responsible for singing religious services in cathedrals and monasteries in medieval Europe had to learn by heart a huge repertory of chants; indeed, it was estimated to take a singer some ten years to learn the entire repertory. So the first attempts to notate music were rather approximate memory aids, depicting the rough outline of melodic shapes, rather than specifying precise pitches and rhythms as modern notation does.

For some musicians today, notation remains a way of writing down music that has already been put together in performance. A good deal of pop music is either not notated at all, or done so only in sketched form – like a set of chords that players ‘realize’ in various ways in performance. While you can buy the sheet music for your favourite rock songs, or even transcriptions of your favourite jazz pianist, these are made after the event rather than being a set of instructions that the musicians play from, as is the case in classical practice. So much music today is made directly in the studio, not just recorded digitally via computer software, but with many of its sounds generated electronically, that the idea of notation simply evaporates as irrelevant.

The new technologies of the music studio mark a significant departure from the formative role played by notation in the classical tradition. One way of defining classical music, which has marked it out from other musical practices, is that it has been very largely a ‘literary’ musical culture, as opposed to an oral one. Like literature, classical music has been fixed in the act of writing in a way that distinguishes it from oral traditions of storytelling or folk music practices. The retelling of a story across different generations in an oral culture is as different to a nineteenth-century novel (fixed in every detail in its printing), as the reworking of a folksong or a jazz tune might be compared to a classical symphony. This idea of fixing a work in all its details (whether a novel or a symphony) is central to the idea of a classical canon, in the first place because it creates the idea of a ‘work’ that is the product of a specific, individual artist (the ‘great writer’ or ‘great composer’). It then follows that the history of classical music, like the history of literature or painting, becomes the history of great works and the artists who made them.

But whether music is notated is not an arbitrary matter. Even early in its development in the Middle Ages, notation allowed for a more complex process of musical composition than playing or singing by ear alone. Notation allowed composers not only to rework and refine their musical ideas over time, it allowed them to develop longer and more complex forms, often made of several layers which could be laid down by the composer in a way that was unthinkable before notation. Works like Spem in alium (c.1570) by the Elizabethan composer Thomas Tallis, or The Rite of Spring (1913) by Stravinsky, depend upon the effect of multiple parts that only become available and manageable by means of notation. The idea of polyphony itself (of many voices working in harmony with each other), central to so much classical music, developed in tandem with ways of notating music more accurately. The notation was developed in order to accommodate the new polyphonic music of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but, at the same time, the new music was shaped by what notation made possible.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of notation for what we think of today as classical music. Not only has it made possible the technical developments of rhythm, harmony, polyphony and extended musical forms for large ensembles of instrumentalists and singers, it has also shaped the idea of a work that is ‘written’ by a composer but ‘performed’ by someone else. It lies behind something that classical music simply takes for granted – that music is composed and performed – two quite separate activities. This is not the case in many other musical cultures where the musicians simply play their own music or sing their own songs. The idea of classical performance – the performance of pre-composed musical scores – presumes an audience and, from the eighteenth century onwards, it became the normative way of hearing classical music to assemble in a special venue to listen silently and passively to a musical performance.

The tradition of concert going associated with classical music is shaped overwhelmingly around the