The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Classical Music
Timothy K. Smith
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Chapter 1
- What Is Classical Music? It’s not pop music, but it has lots of catchy tunes. It’s not rock music, but it often has a good beat and you can dance to it. It’s not folk music, but it often contains folk songs and rhythms. It’s not jazz, but some of it used to be improvised, and some of it still allows for freedom of expression. And an awful lot of it shares a defining characteristic of jazz—a democratic sense of creative community. Classical music obviously means many things, encompasses many expressions. But for a long time now, the term has been almost universally understood to mean a type of music in the Western world that is art first, entertainment second. So there’s an easy answer to the question, “What is classical music?” It’s the kind that doesn’t make much money.Mar 21 2024 3:39PM
- There’s a direct counterpart to pop music in the classical song, more commonly called an “art song,” which does not focus on the development of melodic material. Both the pop song and the art song tend to follow tried-and-true structural patterns. And both will be published in the same way—with a vocal line and a basic piano part written out underneath. But the pop song will rarely be sung and played exactly as written; the singer is apt to embellish that vocal line to give it a “styling,” just as the accompanist will fill out the piano part to make it more interesting and personal. The performers might change the original tempo and mood completely. You won’t find such extremes of approach by the performers of a song by Franz Schubert or Richard Strauss. These will be performed note for note because both the vocal and piano parts have been painstakingly written down by the composer with an ear for how each relates to the other. A wonderful example is Schubert’s song “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel.” The piano becomes as important as the singer, for its rolling accompaniment pattern—like the turning of a spinning wheel—helps set the scene for the song. There is still room for interpretation in an art song, but it will be applied subtly, within the borders set up by the composer. As a rule, the words in these two types of song also help to distinguish them; the classical composer seeks out poetry to set to music, while the pop composer uses “lyrics,” a more vernacular form of poetry.Mar 21 2024 3:16PM