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Instructor: John Schauer
Publications Editor for the Ravinia Festival
WHAT
IS CLASSICAL MUSIC?
Before we tackle
that subject, we should consider (if only briefly) the larger question:
WHAT
IS MUSIC?
A lengthy philosophical
consideration of what constitutes art is a black hole that can suck
up entire careers of aestheticians. Let’s try looking at the
question from the other side: What ISN’T music?
For most people,
the answer is obvious: Anything they can’t stand isn’t
music. What’s the most frequent criticism you hear of , let’s
say, rap music? "That isn’t even music!" For people
who hate opera, Wagner or Puccini "is just a bunch of screaming!"
And many people, if they venture into the depths of atonal 20th-century
music, whether it’s played by a symphony orchestra or a digital
synthesizer, will throw up their hands in bewilderment at what has
become, for them, mere noise.
The fact is,
any music you don’t like won’t sound particularly musical
to you, no matter how many experts testify to its greatness. Classical
music is so vast an arena that no one should feel obligated to like
all of it. So cut yourself some slack as you explore this expansive
world. It’s perfectly possible to love the music of one composer
while having no affinity whatsoever for the music of another. That’s
not a shortcoming; that’s personal taste.
The
flip side of this is that musical enjoyment exists wherever you
find it. There’s a story that George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
once became so entranced by the sounds of a blacksmith hammering
on an anvil that he went home and composed the famous "Harmonious
Blacksmith" variations for harpsichord. Some composers within
the last 50 years have found music in the noise of street traffic
or industrial machines, or even in silence. The moral here is that
if something gives you musical pleasure, don’t let anyone talk
you into thinking it shouldn’t. The pompous title character
of the Frasier TV show once recalled the time when he and his brother
Niles "still thought the 1812 Overture was great music,"
to which Niles retorted, "Were we ever that young?" It’s
a cute joke, underlining the snobbish attitudes of Niles and Frasier,
but Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, taken in the context of what
it was intended to be—a brilliant, celebratory piece that generates
a lot of visceral excitement—is great music, as its popularity
with millions of music-lovers readily attests.
So to keep things
moving, let’s agree on a basic, though by no means incontestable,
definition: Music is an ordered sequence of tones
through time organized so as to have an overall effect, meaning
or shape.
We can narrow
that down further for the purposes of this course by returning to
our original question: What is classical music?
There may be
some confusion in that the word "classical" has two meanings
in music. The broader definition refers to that tradition of Western
art music that began with Gregorian Chant and secular music
of the Middle Ages and stretches up to our day with the music of
such composers as Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Corigliano.
(When used in this general sense here, it will not be capitalized.)
In its narrower sense, it connotes one specific period within that
span, roughly the second half of the 18th century (in which usage
it will be capitalized).
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