Richard Taruskin began his Oxford History of Western Music seriously proposing the era of literate music in the West was coming to an end, a kind of death-of-classical-music that was more typical of a Norman Lebrecht. By the end of the fifth volume he concluded that classical music wasn't dying, it was changing.
I have more than a handful of times floated the idea that the symphony and the orchestral traditions of the long 19th century constituted an equivalent to the ars perfecta of the late Renaissance mass. When the mass of the earlier era gave way to new styles and forms partisans of the older style complained that the new recitative genre was garbage, that any unmusical hack could do that and simulating the rhythms of human speech in such a dubiously literal way was not really musical or expressive.
Here we are in 2023 and I would venture the proposal that rap has become a kind of recitative in our era, declamatory speech that is organically fused with melodic activity and it's the kind of thing that is denounced as the death of melody by partisans of the older ars perfecta equivalents of our era. The historical irony would be that recitative in Italian opera was viewed by partisans of Palestrina and company as being as much anti-musical junk in the time of Monteverdi as rap is viewed by fans of Italian opera now.
Art was supposed to find liberation from court and church, from throne and altar and for a time in the long 19th century instrumental music took flight and became the top dog in the musical arts. Earlier theories of aesthetics and treatises on the arts regarded music as suspect and instrumental music as nearly contemptible for its lack of verbal and propositional content. Mark Evan Bonds has written a few books outlining how that status quote from the 18th century mutated into the Beethoven syndrome we have had since E. T. A. Hoffmann and company.
It's commonplace to see thinkpieces asking how and why classical music has declined or whether classical music can withstand the shift from the private to public realm.
Two links will suffice.
The Romantic era had a lot of salon and club music, though, which was not necessarily "public". There was indeed a lot of public music-making but in histories of classical music hausmusik doesn't figure as prominently in music histories and I, being a guitarist, think there should be a counter-vailing interest in precisely the house music traditions to offset the symphonic stuff. There was plenty of music-making going on in Biedermeier era Vienna but it was not the stuff of Beethovenian legend, exactly. Paul Hindemith contended that the state of musical life should not be assessed on the basis of professional activity but on the basis of amateurs. Sure, he could be a snob about lowbrow pop music like many other emigre composers to the United States but the point remains a point worth considering. It may be more salient now that we've got books like The Death of the Artist lamenting that it is easier than ever to publish in all the arts and harder than ever to monetize that activity.
It may be there's more going on in "classical music" now than can possibly be covered by mainstream music journalism or even indie music journalism. I know that for classical guitar there are half a dozen cycles of preludes and fugues that have been composed mainly in this very century that have not even been discussed in most music journalism, or even in classical guitar journalism. That would be because stuff is on Youtube. German Dzhaparidze's cycle has been recorded but the cycle in score form is unpublished. Gerard Drozd's cycle of preludes and fugues for solo guitar seems to be unavailable in the West. Rekhin's cycle was composed in the last century but has never been recorded in full for a commercial release.
But my soap box issue here (among others) has been that we live in an era in which a synergistic relationship between "pop" and "classical" is both feasible and desirable in North America. I know there are people in Europe who dissent from such a view but I submit those kinds of writers and composers are not being coherent with their own stated views about authenticity and flexibility in the understanding and application of tradition. I'm going to resist the temptation to drag in Jaroslav Pelikan's The Vindication of Tradition beyond a short mention but I see many a claim that "the muse" must be rescued or saved. Writing as a Christian and not a partisan of Greek gods and goddesses I can't help but think that if the muse needs you to rescue her she's not a worthy muse, is she?
The thing about muses is that muses have favorites and muses can move on. Maybe the muses, if muses there be, have left the symphony behind. Maybe expecting the muses to stick around with one art form forever is to misunderstand their nature. Partisans of ars perfecta may well have thought their favorite music was literally heavenly, timeless, eternal and beyond improvement. I do love listening to Renaissance choral music now and then but is that style the norm? Has it even been the norm since roughly 1650?
