...
Musicians have been mixing and matching styles since the dawn of pop, whether it was reggae’s fusion of R&B and calypso, psychedelic rock’s fascination with Indian ragas, British post-punk bands combining dub with disco, or mainstream pop taking influence from classic house music. But until now, audiences still typically fell into more easily categorizable demographics. There’s a longstanding history of rockists refusing to accept rap as legitimate music (or disco for that matter), in the same way that country music has historically existed on its own island that few outsiders would dare touch. While some of these lines have been more tied to race and class than people would like to admit (with labels, magazines, and radio stations targeting specific demographics), these segmented audiences have also been propped up by the simple fact that up until recently, listeners’ access to styles that might fall outside their normal wheelhouse was much more limited.
...
The dawn of pop isn't the dawn of music, obviously, but there could be a case that in the last ten years it has been possible to listen to styles of popular music and hear past the differences in timbre and production values to hear that the song has become the prevailing form of musical expression in commercial and artistic terms over the last century. Chris Delaurenti mentioned something to that effect while he was writing at The Stranger way back in February 2003:
https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/classical--jazz/Content?oid=13532
Centuries hence, when an ambitious music scholar needs a chapter heading for the 20th century, "Age of Song" will be the rubric of choice. Sure, you can tally an impressive list of our era's great symphonies, concertos, oratorios, string quartets, and so on, but those hundred or so pieces are vastly outnumbered by legions of great songs that will stand the test of time. Decade after decade, from parlor-room ditties to the blues, through jazz, swing, and every permutation of rock, great songs abound.
This is no surprise: Songs are usually easier to learn than a 20-minute piano concerto, and more likely to be performed live as well as disseminated on radio and records. Unlike a new symphony, which gets played once and disappears, songwriters stand a slight chance of making money from their art.
Songs are also a convenient springboard for improvisation. In the 1950s, great jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald sang what is now called the Great American Songbook--tunes by George and Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and a dozen or so other songwriters who flowered in the first half of the 20th century.
...If the music education programs have focused on articulating a conception of large-scale musical form indebted to or defined by autonomous instrumental developmental processes (i.e. large-scale forms) songs are not going to pass muster on the basis of those forms of analysis. To invoke the kind of argument Roger Scruton has made, pop songs have no "argument" but by "argument" what is meant is generally the absence of a set of delineating and developmental procedures that transform the core gestures of a melody or its accompaniment patterns into a sonata movement. When conservatives invoke the lack of "argument" they hear in the music of popular song they are invoking a case made by the likes of Roger Scruton that was made earlier by Theodore Adorno against popular song as having any share in musical art or serious music.
I grew up playing guitar and learning songs and singing in choirs in high school and college. The problem I have with the above range of arguments and assertions is that I think you can build a compelling case that the best songs do have an "argument". Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" begins with a verse and chorus that are anchored in circle of fifth progressions and the bridge becomes a chain of chromatic mediants floating above a descending octatonic bass line. There is an argument, a development of harmonic and melodic language around thirds in melodic and root movement activity within the circle-of-fifths blues section of the song and its static, pulsing tonic implied in the vamp of the verse that is finally allowed to erupt into the sublime wordless bridge.
The "argument" is a juxtaposition of the blues of the circle-of-fifths passages with the mediant chains, the melodic and harmonic gestures are, so to speak, trapped within the harmony and tonal gravity of blues as a musical symbol of being trapped in the City, the City as a place of curse and imprisonment (hey, I've read a bit of Jacques Ellul on this topic) not just for black people but for people generally, though the song is about what black people get subjected to in the City. That glorious bridge is where we get to hear, through the symbolism of the harmonic and melodic transformations of pentatonic patterns, what it might sound like to break free of the gravity of the blues into a realm where we are not living just enough for the city. I heard the song when I was a teenager and it blew me away and here I am in middle-age and it still blows me away. I wrote a lot about it a few years back. I have no problem putting "Living for the City" at the same level of artistic achievement as all of the Haydn string quartets, which I also love.
But what Haydn accomplished in his string quartets probably needs to be "translated", translated from the idioms within which he worked into the idioms that are more accessible to the approaches of our time. Haydn played in street bands and, as Charles Rosen put it decades ago, refined an art that was both thoroughly popular in its appeal and learned in technique, a fusion of the virtues of street song and the highest level of learned musicianship.
What sometimes seems to have happened in the last century as what Adorno called the "culture industry" consolidated its business practices is that, as cranky commentary has put it, all of these pop songs all sound the same. It may be that in the last ten years it has become easier for wide-listening people to hear how much songs have in common beyond the surface details of acoustic vs electric, digital vs analog, straight tone vs signal processing, and so on.
The strength of such a moment is that we don't have to be beholden to those aspects of genre which are defined by "ontologically thick" matters such as claiming that if you have a Fender Telecaster you should only be playing country songs on it or that a banjo is only for country music and not contemporary chamber music a la Mark Sylvester. Hmm, chamber banjo concerto? I'm going to have to give that a listen.
The weakness of such a moment may be that the more widely we listen and the more readily we hear past the specific sounds to the forms, the distinction between what Theodore Gracyk has called "ontologically thick" and "ontologically thin" ways of listening to music or conceiving it, the more we can have Adorno's problem with popular music and light classical music, we hear the schematic, the trope beneath the surface, the cliche beneath the details. That may be a sign that the music is bad, true, but it may also be a sign of over-consumption in listening habits, too.
But there's another aspect of a possible downside to the song being so powerfully present in contemporary auditory imagination, which is something that comes up at An Overgrown Path
As the song has developed in cultural terms and as it has helped shape how people listen, classical music has not exactly been taught or written with an ear or a mind toward accounting for that century long shift.
https://www.overgrownpath.com/2019/11/classical-music-is-not-connecting-with.html
...
For years classical music has been engaged in an obsessive search for a new audience. Yet it has singularly failed to recognise that new means fundamentally different. The most glaring example of this failure in cognition is the long-running saga of the acoustically perfect concert hall. As explained above, research shows that among the general music audience - very sadly - 'no one minds' about sound quality, and that accessibility is what really matters. Yet the the classical music establishment continues to devote huge sums to building inaccessible - public transport problems, urban crime etc - city centre concert halls with impeccable acoustics, instead of spending a fraction of the cost on taking classical masterpieces out into the provinces and into acoustically-challenged venues.
Classical's new audience must be drawn from the wider general music audience. Among the craved-for young demographic dance music is the genre of choice. Widespread exposure to EDM (electronic dance music) - it is a $7 billion global market - has dramatically rewired the sonic expectations of this market segment. Sound levels are higher, low frequencies dominate, and synchronised visuals are integral to the performance. But the classical industry still assumes that the neural circuits of its new audience were hardwired in 18th century Vienna. New technologies are still considered heretical in the concert hall, despite the invention of the ondes Martenot in 1928 and its adoption by Messiaen and others, and of the use of a synthesizer as an orchestral instrument in one of the unrecognised masterworks of the 20th century, Valentin Silvestrov's Requiem for Larissa.
It is one of many classical conundrums that electronic compositions are marginalised, while the huge new audience waiting on its doorstep listens to nothing but electronic music. Classical music's duplicitous attitude towards electronic music is shown by coverage of the award of the Giga Hertz Grand Prize to Éliane Radigue. Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc has been adopted by the classical music community as its 'go to' online resource. When covering the award Lebrecht piously lamented that it may represent "an epitaph for mid-20th century experimentalism". Yet a search of Slipped Disc reveals that Éliane Radigue had never previously been mentioned on the website. Presumably mid-20th century experimentalism died because it is not good click bait.
But some brave souls have tried to bridge the culture gap. Dutch composer Jurriaan Andriessen (1925-1996), who was brother of the better-known Louis Andriessen, studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and in the USA with Serge Koussevitsky and Aaron Copland. Although best know for his compositions for conventional orchestral forces - he composed for state ceremonies including the coronation of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and wrote the score for the Oscar winning film “The Assault” (1986) - Jurriaan Andriessen recorded three synthesizer albums in the late 1970s and the artwork for these provides the illustrations for my post.
...
My personal route to classical enlightenment was via 1960s/70s prog rock, and it puzzles me why today classical music does not make more effort to reach out to the progressive non-classical audience. This, of course, does not mean dumbing down the classical masterworks, so no Beethoven Nine with added synthesizer. However a recent post discussed the difficulty of finding music to preface that symphony. So how about Beethoven's Ninth prefaced in the first half with Steve Roach's essay in electronica Truth & Beauty? Or Pictures at an Exhibition paired with Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings, and Mahler's Sixth Symphony following J. Peter Schwalm's The Beauty of Disaster?
...
I, too, got into prog rock and one of the things I noticed about prog rock was that for all I found to admire about the music it is ghastly to a lot of people steeped in more popular and mainstream song.
All the way back in 2006 I published "Calm blue oceans and thunderstorms". The essay, I think, I really wrote somewhere as far back as 2001 or 2002. The gist of the essay was like an observation Haydn made about some of his contemporaries, that there were composers who wrote music that had plenty of good hooks, indeed a surfeit of ideas that were drowned from being memorable by a surfeit of organizing techniques. Prog rock could be likened to those symphonies in Haydn's time that had more hooks than was good for them being remembered not just in our century but in Haydn's own lifetime. That keeps on happening. I'm reminded of nights where I'd head home from a symphony concert and would realize that even on the bus ride home I couldn't even remember the themes of the new piece that had been premiered. The only world premiere I heard played in Seattle in the last twenty years at the symphony that I remembered clearly after I had heard it once was the Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto. I haven't been able to make to the symphony so much and my priorities are more with guitar music but I trust my point has been made, there have always been musical works that are enjoyable enough while you're listening to them that don't stick with you.
When I hear songs on the radio I would say much of the time the hooks are played to death and over-exposed without being transformed in some way.
There are all kinds of things that can be done about that.
To piggyback off of Pliable's riff, how about a William Grant Still symphony and a Stevie Wonder song? Let's drop Mahler altogether, no offense meant to Mahler fans, although the Sixth is alright. I might go for Hindemith's Mathis der Maler (symphonic suite, which I love) with Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige.
But, really, it wouldn't be that difficult to take Monk themes and instead of doing some jazz medley someone could compose a sonata movement using those themes. Not to run amok of copyright, obviously, but the argument I've been making very slowly, at a glacial pace, at this blog in the last few years is that in terms of techniques of large-scale gestural transformation anyone should be able to take a classic jazz standard by Monk or Ellington or Coltrane and create a sonata from that. Do some kind of Charles ives style cumulative form fugue based on something derived from a Monk theme and then have it culminate in a presentation of the Monk theme but only after you did something like taking the inversion of "Let's Cool One" and making a fugue of that, for instance.
Back in college someone I knew proposed that a sonata could be like a verse and a chorus and a verse and a chorus and a bridge and so on. Sort of ... at a macrostructural level, in terms of proportions, I agree ... but the problem is that the Scrutons of the world will point out there is a lack of "argument". The verse is rarely in a key contrasting with the chorus and the formal resolutions that occur in a recapitulation don't happen in a verse-chorus after the bridge. But ... if we rethink that, if we propose that a sonata could be made by having a verse-chorus as theme 1 and a bridge as theme 2 then that could lend itself to being worked out in terms of a sonata form pretty readily. In 2013 I was mulling over the idea that what is important in a sonata form is not so much that theme 1 and theme 2 are actually different in terms of core melodic content as they are given thematic differentiation. This could be something as simple as changing the accompaniment patterns or harmonic support or the mode of a theme, or all of those, without changing the actual melodic contour itself.
The more I have thought about these things over the course of twenty years the more I think that there is an even clearer way to bridge the gap between sonata forms and popular songs than trying to shoehorn pop song structures into the schematics of sonata. That hasn't yielded much but ... let's say we decided to rework ragtime pieces into sonata forms. That's easy to imagine. How easy? Let me show you. This is something old at the blog you can see after the break. ...
