Musicon / Musical education / Classical music – It reaches depths that everyday music just doesn’t
-Classical music – It reaches depths that everyday music just doesn’t
The distinction should be made, not so much between classical and pop musics, but between music created primarily as an entertainment and music that attempts to express more profound human issues. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment. We all love a good song. But it isn’t the only thing there is. And we should not judge the one by the standards of the other.
Drama is the key word: Like a play or a film, classical music deals with multiple characters (called themes) as they interact over time, and where you start isn’t where you end. Popular music is a place; classical music is a journey. There are five important ways classical music differs from pop.
Pop music may be likened to music videos, classical to a full-length feature. The plot takes longer to develop.
Its dependence on harmony both structurally and expressively. A sonata is built on D-major or F-minor, and the elaborate and subtle changes in harmony are both the structural and expressive content of classical music. You don’t need to know the name, but you feel the changes of harmony in your chest, physically.
Its reliance on variety and contrast. Unlike pop, which sustains a single clear mood, classical moves constantly, now fast, now slow; now loud, now a whisper. It seldom keeps a single mood for long, but asks you to compare and contrast.
Whether it’s a fugue or a quartet, there almost always is more than one thing going on at any given moment. You have to be able to hear two or more things at once.
“Memory is the important part,” ASU clarinetist Robert Spring says. “You need to have a musical memory of some kind to distinguish between what happened before and what happens now.” You have to pay attention, the way you would when reading a novel, keeping track of what’s happening to Raskolnikov at any given time and how he changes over time.
Of all these things, harmony is the hardest to discuss in words. There is no non-musical language to express the modulation from D-major to A-flat. You have to hear it. Or you try to describe it in words that can’t possibly mean anything to a non-musician: An enharmonic shift, followed by a run around the circle of fifths. Does that mean anything to you? Didn’t think so. But you can hear it without naming it. Like the way you can hear the “changes” in 12-bar blues. You can feel when the phrase starts anew, with each chord change. It’s only more extreme when you follow the same kind of repeating chord changes in the finale of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony: You feel the drive of those harmonies racing to the finish line.
Harmony is the emotional effect created by playing several notes at once as a single idea. It also is the movement from one set of notes to another, and the emotional effect created by that shift. “Western music has the idea of expectation and release in it,” Carpenter says. “Play a dominant-seventh chord and then try to stop. You can’t do it comfortably. You have to have it resolve.” Harmony, more than rhythm, provides the forward motion of classical music.
Of course, pop and classical aren’t mutually exclusive genres. It’s more of a spectrum of intent: There is pop that tackles serious issues and there is classical music meant merely to entertain. And there are many classical musics from around the world: Indian, Chinese – and for many of us, American jazz – are classical musics. They all tend to be longer and more complex than the popular music from those same cultures.
Classical music isn’t only music with violins and oboes. It can be made with synthesizers or electric guitars, as any fan of Philip Glass or Steve Reich knows. Classical is not a style but an approach; not a sound but a way of thinking about music and what music means.
If all this makes classical music sound like work, well, it is. It requires more from the listener. But there is a reward for all the effort you put in. “It reaches depths of our souls that everyday music just doesn’t,” Carpenter says. And it satisfies the hunger that poet William Carlos Williams defined: something that is difficult, but “men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
Popular music deals with thoughts and emotions that are understood and already defined; classical attempts to understand things that we don’t yet fully grasp: the big questions of life and existence that don’t have simple answers. Like all fine art, it seeks rather than finds. “It’s a richer experience, and some people graduate into it”, tuba player and ASU professor Sam Pilafian says.
By Richard Nilsen, The Arizona Republic; excerpts, edited by MUSICON