when is "classical" not?
Jan. 31st, 2007 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearJust wondering how the labellists out there decide the grounds between what belongs in classical and what belongs in "new age" (not that THAT label has any real meaning anymore, either).
Case in point, I picked up on a whim, Steve Reich's 18 and I absolutely adore it, but aside from the instrument choices, it doesn't really strike me as "classical". Its a product of its era, and sits more comfortably side-by-side (on my shelf, anyways) with Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre, early pre-rock Mike Oldfield, and a large amount of Robert Fripp's output, along with a number of various synth artists out there.
The only difference seems to be that Reich's performers, like Glass and Riley, play every note, while the pioneering synth artists learned how to program a computer to do the repetitiveness factor that would drive must human musicians nuts. Certainly one can debate which is harder, playing such patterns consistently to the point of achieving music or programming the old sequencers to do the same, and one can marvel at how the patterns that Reich developed are now so subconsciously standard that pretty much any sequencer has them built-in out of the box, ready to be abused in creating another "pop" standard.
So really, when the late 20th century is looked at in hindsight, will these artists still be separated into the labels ("classical", "new age", "rock") that they currently are in (from a marketing view, not a historical one), or will successive generations look to this school of the late 20th century as a whole?
Actually my real question is can labels change as music is looked at from the hindsight perspective?
For a while, the Brahms/Schumann vs Wagner/Bruckner distinctions seemed to overwhelmingly split the view of the 19th century, but Mahler impressively combined the two styles (stretched symphonic form of Brahms plus the harmonic ambiguity of Wagner) into one, while Debussy and Stravinsky launched into realms of dissonance and tonal ambiguity as to make the critical fight between the two sides seem downright silly. We just look at it all as late 19th century music now, reflective of the attitudes of the time.
So will the same happen for our century? Will Stravinsky's embracing of serialism at the end of his career (I finally dug into Agon this week and adored it) be the joining point that will have historians stop treating the two main schools of mid-20th century music as separate? Will minimalism's influence on electronic music (and vice-versa) lead to a unification of it and that subset of "new age" in the historical view? How would such a merging evolve, critically, when we're all still so tainted by the labels attached to things in the record stores today (something that wouldn't have had an influence on how the early 20th century saw 19th century music)?
just random thoughts. seeing how history evolves as new primary documents are presented, i tend to wonder how things today will be viewed differently given our *awareness* of the importance of primary documentation. as more of how we view the world today is preserved than decades past, will our view taint how successive generations view this one?
(this all started in my head over 20 years ago, when my father once insisted that Dark Side of the Moon will someday sit side by side with a late Mozart symphony in the respect of music lovers in the future; little did he know that XM's Fine Tuning would almost do exactly that! he's been right before; back then he also predicted that we'd be able to hold a symphony in a tiny chip on our fingertip, which is exactly what you can do 100 times over with a 1-gig SD card today).
Case in point, I picked up on a whim, Steve Reich's 18 and I absolutely adore it, but aside from the instrument choices, it doesn't really strike me as "classical". Its a product of its era, and sits more comfortably side-by-side (on my shelf, anyways) with Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre, early pre-rock Mike Oldfield, and a large amount of Robert Fripp's output, along with a number of various synth artists out there.
The only difference seems to be that Reich's performers, like Glass and Riley, play every note, while the pioneering synth artists learned how to program a computer to do the repetitiveness factor that would drive must human musicians nuts. Certainly one can debate which is harder, playing such patterns consistently to the point of achieving music or programming the old sequencers to do the same, and one can marvel at how the patterns that Reich developed are now so subconsciously standard that pretty much any sequencer has them built-in out of the box, ready to be abused in creating another "pop" standard.
So really, when the late 20th century is looked at in hindsight, will these artists still be separated into the labels ("classical", "new age", "rock") that they currently are in (from a marketing view, not a historical one), or will successive generations look to this school of the late 20th century as a whole?
Actually my real question is can labels change as music is looked at from the hindsight perspective?
For a while, the Brahms/Schumann vs Wagner/Bruckner distinctions seemed to overwhelmingly split the view of the 19th century, but Mahler impressively combined the two styles (stretched symphonic form of Brahms plus the harmonic ambiguity of Wagner) into one, while Debussy and Stravinsky launched into realms of dissonance and tonal ambiguity as to make the critical fight between the two sides seem downright silly. We just look at it all as late 19th century music now, reflective of the attitudes of the time.
So will the same happen for our century? Will Stravinsky's embracing of serialism at the end of his career (I finally dug into Agon this week and adored it) be the joining point that will have historians stop treating the two main schools of mid-20th century music as separate? Will minimalism's influence on electronic music (and vice-versa) lead to a unification of it and that subset of "new age" in the historical view? How would such a merging evolve, critically, when we're all still so tainted by the labels attached to things in the record stores today (something that wouldn't have had an influence on how the early 20th century saw 19th century music)?
just random thoughts. seeing how history evolves as new primary documents are presented, i tend to wonder how things today will be viewed differently given our *awareness* of the importance of primary documentation. as more of how we view the world today is preserved than decades past, will our view taint how successive generations view this one?
(this all started in my head over 20 years ago, when my father once insisted that Dark Side of the Moon will someday sit side by side with a late Mozart symphony in the respect of music lovers in the future; little did he know that XM's Fine Tuning would almost do exactly that! he's been right before; back then he also predicted that we'd be able to hold a symphony in a tiny chip on our fingertip, which is exactly what you can do 100 times over with a 1-gig SD card today).
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Date: 2007-02-01 04:11 am (UTC):-)
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Date: 2007-02-01 02:12 pm (UTC)I consider all works of John Williams and similar movie composers to be classical. So I can't place a time period on my opinion of what is or isn't classical.
At any rate about 98% of what they play on Beethoven.com is what I call classical. Same goes for about 90% of what one hears on the classical stations up by me. I lowered the % because they do have things like Pipe Dreams on Sunday which is all organ music which I loathe. AND I just don't consider classical. Same goes for much of what is played on the harpsichord. Despite much of it being written in what some would call the period of classical music. It just doesn't *sound* classical to me. So I guess to be simplistic...it's the sound that makes something classical. Anyway, sorry I didn't get technical or detailed. I'm not well-versed enough on classical. I just really like it and it's what I listen to at least 90% of my listening day.