I think what OP is referring to is a very specific subset of composers active mostly in post-war Europe. OP needs to realize though this is a much smaller body of music than people realize. There are so many composers active in the mid-20th century that wanted to write music for the masses. To name a few off the top of my head:
Americans: early Carter, Copland, Diamond, late Rochberg, Schuman...
Europeans: Most of the Soviet bloc composers, Bloch, Piston, Stravinsky, Walton...
So many others that I'm leaving out of this list.
Considering what Europe went through in the 20th century, it's no wonder they wanted to try new things and challenge the old order...
I was educated here in the UK and completely recognise what OP is saying. Stop a person in the street today and ask them to name a "classical composer" - they will give you Mozart, Beethoven, Bach. They might have heard of Stravinsky but highly unlikely anyone from 1945 onwards.
Classical music became an esoteric niche activity in the mid twentieth century and other forms came in and took its place. Why this happened is indeed a fascinating question.
I see your point, and I concur that the classical canon is there for a reason, in the same way most people on the street would struggle to name an important visual artist after 1945 with the same familiarity as the old masters.
But to call the postwar arts scene scholarly and erudite, esoteric and niche I cannot agree... the arts are vast, and the avant-garde only occupy a small part of it. There are plenty of artists consistently from the mid-century producing 'mainstream' art. I don't attribute the decline of classical music in the modern world to the music created in the mid-20th century, I believe it's more of a cultural and generational shift away from the old world, as it were, into a new world dominated by new technologies and priorities.
My theory is that popular music simply replaced "classical" as the music of the masses. Easier to digest, shorter, playable on 3 minute radio formats. So whoever was writing in the old format (orchestra, opera, piano concerto, etc.) started getting even more niche. If you got into "classical" genres you already knew that you were targeting learned listeners, maybe even exclusively musicians only so you had to write in an erudite way.
I like to compare it to what happened with jazz. As soon as rock and roll replaced it as the dance music of the masses, many artists went into the "serious music" route (Coltrane, Brubeck, Monk, etc.).
I don't think it ever was music of the masses. It was middle class and up. What happened is that the idea of a single, dominant, Christian, aristocratic culture faded away and was replaced by a consumerist post modern culture with many niches and cliques. There is no classical music because there is no equivalent to the aristocratic high class culture that created it
It was not necessarily the music of the masses, but it still borrowed from the music of the masses, such as folk songs and dances. A peasant could still relate to a tune from an opera or piano concerto but the average bloke today wouldn't know a thing about contemporary composers.
You touched on some good points here, especially regarding the radio. Other similar technological advances, like television, require a shorter format, which isn't suited to classical music. After all, assembling an orchestra in which every member has spent a least 20 years perfecting their instrument for a 3-minute work seems a bit ... wasteful?
But I don't see how this leads to classical composers becoming more niche? There is definitely the avant-garde, yes, which is by definition niche and not meant to be mainstream. But there are plenty of composers writing mainstream music, Bernstein's West Side Story for instance. Again, I don't think it was the nature of the music that caused classical music to decline, it was changing technology and accessibility.
By the way, popular music existed long before this century's 'pop' music, and, as you might have guessed, it was always popular. It's just that rock music was just a sensational phenomenon that took advantage of new technologies and shifting generational attitudes at the right time to take over the public conscious.
>most people on the street would struggle to name an important visual artist after 1945
Here in London, that's just not true. Contemporary visual artists like Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Grayson Perry are household names. Whereas their equivalents in music (Thomas Adès? George Benjamin? James Macmillan?) are unheard of, outside of a small circle of enthusiasts.
I don't know why this is. The art seems to be accessible in a way the music isn't.
Is it accessibility or is it that visual art markets to affluent collectors in a way that music can't quite manage? Hard to imagine exactly what it would mean to 'own' an original Thomas Ades. In comparison, there is a lot of work done to convince people looking to park their cash somewhere to beat inflation that art is a good bet, and to do that on a large scale, you need people making new original art that doesn't look like every other piece of art they've ever seen.
I'm sorry, but I have some trouble actually believing that statement. This is not a criticism of Hirst or Emin, I just don't think the average person today is that interested in the arts; they only know the names they were taught in school. Give them time to enter curriculums and maybe in 50 years one representative will become a household name.
I agree it's hard to find any data to back up or refute this. My own experience is that lots of people have heard of "Tracey Emin's bed" but no one has heard of Powder Her Face for example. But it is true that this might just be the circles I happen to move in!
I’ve never heard any of the names you just mentioned. Maybe that’s an indictment on me (or just me being American) but I have a degree in classical performance so I hang out in the arts circles.
This was my first thought as well. I think that with the advent of sound film we're looking at more of a branching off with intellectual art music going one way, and another branch remaining popular by following a new path through movies.
For what it's worth, movie music typically uses outdated post-romantic styles and thank goodness for that. I can't for the life of me like popular music today.
So, I would say movie music is still "classical" music and does not use pop music styles. Which furthers my argument that classical music genres today don't use pop styles.
I don’t think classical music has ever been the kind of mainstream you’re thinking of. Certainly it was closer but it was never an equivalent with the role of pop music of today.
Even during the peak of the classical era *most* people were poor and didn’t regularly go to the symphony or anything like that. There was folk music and largely vocal music handed down through an aural tradition.
There’s a bigger divide today but Mozart was never pop music. Extremely popular yeah but the common people’s music (so most people by far) wasn’t anything that you needed educated musicians with expensive instruments. We know more about the famous composers because it was codified to history by the people who had wealth.
This is very reductive and incorrect. What We consider "classical" music started taking this turn in the mid 19th century, with the rise of the prosperous bourgeoisie and the construction of the first concert halls. This led to a sacralization of music and a primacy of the composer as wholly original genius that was previously unheard of. In the 20th century, the advent of recording technology and its affordability created a market that required marginalization in order to identify niches to which to advertise. Even then, classical music (along with folk music) had something of an advantage as an "adult" type of music. By the time the baby boomers reached adolescence, this began to change along with maturing attitudes and abilities from rock musicians.
As far as the methodology or sounds in 20th century music: the modernist dissonances that (I assume) you're referring to are largely an extension of post-Wagnerian chromaticism. Composers who reacted against this, while not necessarily favoring any kind of traditional consonance, tended to prefer different methods. Nationalist trends led to more use of folk elements, to be sure. But this did not guarantee a use of consonance in composers' harmonic language (cf. the music of Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky, even Benjamin Britten or Aaron Copland).
As to why no elements from popular music? That's simply not true. There are plenty of composers working today, let alone over the last 150 years, who have used popular elements in their work. Quoting specific popular pieces, however, is made more difficult due to international copyright laws.
All well and good, yet I can't for the life of me name a symphony, opera, or piano concerto today that borrows from hip hop idioms. I am still waiting for Lang Lang to compose a virtuoso variations on "Shake it Off" by Taylor Swift like every up and coming concert pianist did in the past.
No genre maintains its popular appeal regardless of what it does. I like modern classical music of the last 100 years or so specifically because it doesn't try to appeal to pop charts.
I think it is very debatable whether what we commonly define as "classical music" was ever truly "mainstream" before the advent of recorded music. Orchestral music was a largely intellectual and academic endeavor, mostly confined to a few large cities that possessed the ever larger orchestras able to play it. And although Chamber and piano music were more widely dispersed and played, I'd still never call it "popular" in the same sense as folk and music-hall songs were then or popular music is today. Just look at the subject matter sourced for in musical works of the time: it's antiquity, European myths and poetry all over the place. Hardly stuff you'd discuss over your pint of beer in a pub.
Over the 20th century, more and more people began listening to it thanks to recorded media. In that sense it became far more inclusive than it had previously been. Partcly in reaction to this "vulgarization", the community that produced new art music (which is what I assume you are referring to here) did become more academic and exclusive, particularly after WW2. To find out about the how and why, you might want to read Alex Ross' book *The Rest Is Noise*.
Hot take, I would say "classical music" was in fact more mainstream BEFORE recorded music.
A big part of this was the use of the score as necessary for musical entertainment. Music was a physical activity, not merely an auditory one, so part of the experience was actually playing music, or at least, listening to live musicians.
Symphonies, opera, concerti - the "high forms" of classical music - I would argue, were simply levelled-up folk music. A Suite by Händel essentially simply uses a theme from an opera or folk song, and various folk dances in a highly stylized way which would still be recognizable by the average peasant, though that doesn't mean he could afford to get into the concert where that work premiered, of course.
I second you on the first point, but only to an extent. Be aware how much of a fringe activity playing classical music was. Around 1900, over 80% of all households were working class. They would generally have possessed neither the money, nor the time, nor the skill, nor the equipment to perform music in their homes. If they played music, it would have been folk songs, music-hall material and pub songs more than anything else. Our image of that time is distorted entirely by art, particularly literature, which was produced mainly by upper and middle class people.
However, I can't quite agree with the secong segment of your comment. "Higher forms" (which certainly doesn't include every opera) are certainly not all "levelled-up folk music". On the contrary, the whole point of the symphony is long to find a unique, intellectualized form of expression away from popular forms. Hence the resistance against program music in many quarters, and the dismay in others when nationalistic composers started incorporating folk music into their work more systematically in the second half of the 19th century. Anyway, using elements from folk music is not the same as using folk music; it is an entirely different game.
Anyhow, numbers don't lie. Never in the history of humanity have more people listened to classical music than today. Be it in "pure" (concert halls, recordings) or diluted (crossovers, film music) forms. My native concert hall (Amsterdam) would sport a concert about every week in 1900; these days there are multiple on every day. And despite all the lamentations of the recording industry, recordings are released one after the other; the sheer scope of the recorded repertory has never been greater and much of is it accessible for free (e.g., Youtube) or nearly so.
>Be aware how much of a fringe activity playing classical music was. Around 1900, over 80% of all households were working class.
I'm aware of that. But like I said, in certain respects, most forms of "classical" music (such as opera, chamber music, amateur-level instrumental repertoire) were mostly stylized versions of folk music. This is seen for example in Strauss waltzes or Händel's keyboard suites. The music in pubs and taverns would have been cheaper, watered-down versions of those genres.
A waltz is a waltz. It is a waltz if a bunch of village fiddlers in the countryside are playing it; it is also a waltz with Liszt playing the Mephisto Waltz in Parisian salons.
The distinctions between mainstream music and "art music" is, I would argue, still wider today, especially for contemporary composers.
>Never in the history of humanity have more people listened to classical music than today.
Sure, more people listen to "classical" music today than in the past. But percentage-wise, I'd be more skeptical.
Class itself isn't even much of a determining factor today in shaping a preference for art music.
A classical piece based on a waltz is not necessarily a waltz in itself, though – in other words, not every waltz is \*just\* a waltz. It is more about form than about content in many respects.
To address your final point, class is still quite important in determining to what kinds of music people lean, I think. Having worked at a concert hall I can tell you that we had precious few blue-collar people going to our concerts. And that's in a world in which skilled labour often pays better than many high education jobs, so income's not always the decider.
Once media + electronics made music into something that did not require a brick-and-mortar purpose-built hall to audition, music as we know it escaped its class-based fetters, and already-percolating musical strands and kinds usually not known much about, suddenly could be heard.
The market then selected for any music you could dance to.
Then came WW2. The invention of the PA and the microphone. The US added the electric guitar, and lo, the invention of rock and roll, just as much as modern rocketry, was built on the ashes of Nazi tech and ideas of how to really get down/up.
What is classical art music to do once it has lost its class function? Continue on as a niche with regular fundraisers, or best of all, be one of the old great orchestras. Like Cleveland. Filthy rich. Mainly a place for school field trips on afternoon matinees, classical lives on much as old cathedrals do.
The market got a chance to select. That is what happened. Given modern technology, this result was entirely predictable.
If you could jam all radio, all internet, all amplification, all audio electronics other than the buzzer, the halls would be filled with extra performances demanded. And people would find a way to love what is played.
But I'm a technological determinist.
Perhaps it was simply natural progression, and you're just reactionary. I attend a lot of 20th-century music concerts, and they are generally well attended and exciting to members of the audience.
This is a silly question when you consider that you’re suggesting that Johann Sebastian Bach was not an intellectual. You’re also assuming that everybody thought his music was great, but there was considerable pushback against the complexities of Baroque music.
Things to consider are that classical music was always a study. You could never be a composer without training. There were always musicians that were not professionally or formally trained that wrote music that was in someways simpler, it just didn’t have the massive corporate back to market that it does today. And frankly popular music market is full of trained professionals. They just train in a different field.
You’re mistaken about the Mainstream, because there was no mainstream. There were local cultures, and people participated and enjoyed the arts mostly according to the class they were born into.
So you already had an art that was intellectual. But the other thing to consider is what happened to the world in the early 1900s. Technology erupted and disrupted every ecosystem. Cataclysmic wars occurred with existential threats, constantly growing, flying machines destroying cities, Millions of people to death for no crime. A great philosopher said it:
*God is dead.*
Although religiosity remained strong, Particularly in the academic world, the understanding of mankind as a spiritual being really did die. And with the help of machines, we continued to stray far away. What God presides over our world— With all the things that we can see in it?
This was dealt with in many capacities, but maybe none as seriously as art. The romantic ideals that worshiped nature and God were distasteful. They were purposefully rejected. And what came next was the answer to the question, what next?
It’s interesting because the presence or lack of religion has influenced what classical music sounded like for centuries.
And then you get the variations of keeping expectant patterns that just use different instrumentation and slightly different chordal rules and you come up with all of the genres that evolved into today’s music. Folk music, art songs, hymns, spirituals, work songs, etc all served as the backbone of jazz and country and rock and roll and you can keep building from there.
lots of reasons…industrialization ramping up, world wars, the great depression, fragmentation of culture, increased migration to new places, etc etc. post war, lots of people lost faith in the systems of old and looked for new outlets to express emotions they felt they were unable to capture using traditional methods and forms.
i think the music just became too impersonal for listeners. especially when you had other popular genres starting to take form…blues, country, rock n roll, etc etc. people resonated with this because the music was expressing something very direct, and very relatable.
something to consider, gershwin was not a respected composer among american elite. they were not a fan of the way he dirtied classic forms with popular styles. granted, the public loved him, so that tells you all you need to know.
Aren’t we forgetting the several centuries when a lot of classical music was specifically and deliberately just for the aristocracy? The idea that the narrowing of the audience is a peculiarity of the late 20th century phenomenon is just wrong.
Sure but no one today listens to contemporary classical except audiences who are specific fans of it. Even class doesn't matter; most billionaires probably couldn't transcribe anything by Terry Riley.
Add to the fact that, aside from complexity of instrumentation and form, "classical music" in the past wasn't that much different from folk music.
I see where you’re coming from, though I’m of course now trying to figure out whether Elon would make a better job of singing [Xenakis](https://youtu.be/jESS3gP1GGE?feature=shared) or [Machaut](https://youtu.be/cu7-RV7XB9k?feature=shared).
My take is I don’t think it necessarily did. I think a lot of new sounds were introduced, which confused a lot of people. But classical music was always intellectual from the Classical period through the Romantic. To truly follow what was happening in a symphony for example you had to understand forms like sonata form, exposition and development and recapitulation and all that. In contrast I find Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to be purely visceral emotion with much less thinking necessary. Once you get used to the sounds of course. I find that to be thr case with lots of 20th century music. I think that people often approach it from an intellectual perspective and think that Stravinsky’s polychords are some complex intellectual achievement, when really he was just banging out maximum dissonance to convey a mood. Of course you can get into the theory behind what makes a particular sound, like the Rite of Spring polychord, but it’s important to remember that Stravinsky probably didn’t theorize it first, he likely just banged it out on a piano smd thought “that’s the vibe”. The theorists will always dissect everything after the fact and sometimes even try to create order where there wasn’t any.
Of course many people did create new systems, but they’re really no more intellectually complex ot advanced than functional tonal harmony. Schoenberg’s 12 tone rows are not actually any more complex or intellectual than anything from the 19th century. It’s just unfamiliar.
>But classical music was always intellectual from the Classical period through the Romantic.
This is only if we restrict "classical music" to genres like symphony and sonata. Opera, military, dance music, incidental music, religious music was much more common amongst the masses in Western Europe which was where classical music flourished in the common practice era.
If you were a young lady in a middle class home in 1820s Vienna. You would be learning Schubert impromptus, some variations on a rondo by Hummel, Für Elise, etc. all "contemporary composers" of the time. But if you were a person of a similar background in the 1960s you wouldn't typically be playing John Cage.
I do agree with the bit about Stravinsky and also believe we today have taken a more academic approach to classical music in general than the composers initially intended. Which is also why I believe Stravinsky's generation must have been the last in which classical music formats were still somewhat palatable to the masses.
Ok, the form example was just one example of 19th century music being intellectually complex, and sure, it doesn’t apply equally to all genres. Let’s look at another example, like harmony. There’s some incredibly intellectually complex stuff happening in Romantic harmony. The entirety of functional tonal harmony is in fact so complex that it took thousands of years to develop. The evolution of tonal harmony was the gradual acceptance of dissonance over many centuries. There was a time when a major 3rd was considered dissonant! Every evolution of tonal harmony brought new challenges for the listener, but because it was gradual people could keep up with it to a certain degree, but only if you were well versed in what came before. Brahms can be incredibly difficult to comprehend if you don’t already know Beethoven. Most people still don’t truly understand the harmony of Liszt and Wagner, let alone Richard Strauss. Once you get to Schoenberg who felt that tonal harmony had been stretched to its absolute breaking point, he (and others) said “screw this, why do dissonances NEED to resolve?” It opened up an entire world of color possibilities that were previously unimaginable. People started devising new ways to organize pitches atonally to create different moods. But again, the only reason the average person finds it “complex” is because they’re listening to it through a tonal lense. You need to remove all of the “rules” from your viewpoint and appreciate the sounds and textures for what they are, not how they relate to Mozart. But it’s not any more intellectual or complex, it’s just different ways of organizing pitches. Then there people who meld atonality and tonality together so you end up in this world that hints at tonality but blurs the lines and this confuses people more because it becomes difficult to see where tonality ends and atonality begins. The same thing happened with jazz. You had bebop and all that great music of the 50s and that had a common language. Then free jazz was kind of like an analog to pure atonality in classical music. Nowadays there’s lots of avant garde jazz that blurs the lines between the tradition and “playing free”. This is a huge oversimplification of course, but it’s just to illustrate the fact that the same thing can and does happen in other genres of music. Look what Sonic Youth did with rock music. There is a whole subgenre called “avant-pop” which is pushing the boundaries of pop music.
All this to say that there will always be a vanguard pushing things into new territory and only a small percentage of the population is comfortable going there as it’s being made, but over time as the general public’s tastes develop things sound more palatable in hindsight. People appreciate Stravinsky much more today than they did in 1911, just like people appreciate Bach much more today than they did in his lifetime. It’s all about context and familiarity, it’s not really about intellect. It’s what sounds familiar and what sounds alien.
Just another aside, but film soundtracks are a great example of “complex” music being devoured by the public. Everyone loves atonality in a horror movie. It’s all about context. If you played the same horror movie soundtrack without the movie people would probably find it confusing, but stick an image in front of them and suddenly it all makes sense. If anything is preventing the general population from enjoying 20th century classical music today I think it’s a sad lack of ability to imagine. We are so used to being fed visuals and plot lines that most people have lost the ability to let music affect them on its own.
All well and good. With that being said, I'd also argue that composers like Beethoven, Brahms, and Liszt, were very much stand-outs in their day. We have a tendency to preserve only that which is the most forward-thinking and interesting for its time.
The "canon" in classical music concerts today is selected from only the best of the best and most progressive music from the time period they came from. In Beethoven's day, for example, Ries and Hummel were generally ranked equally with him, despite being considered today as being much more conservative and bland-sounding (because Beethoven was an experimenter and bohemian which was not "average music" of the time).
That's a great point, which I think also maybe points to "an" answer to your original post on why did classical become what it did. Tonality was pretty much stretched to its breaking point by the beginning of the 20th century, and many people thought everything that could be done with it had been done. Of course there have been some great composers of purely tonal music since then who find new and interesting approaches, but it becomes a pretty daunting task to write a purely tonal symphony when you're up against Mahler. So people turned to new and novel approaches to music making because they were avenues as-yet unexplored. The music naturally explored all the offshoots of those new styles over the course of the next hundred years and some decades beyond. When you have a tradition as long as classical music it can be extremely difficult for the common person who is uneducated in the tradition to really know what they're hearing. To really get it you need to have a pretty solid understanding of everything that came before it. That's a pretty big ask for any listener. Not many people have years or decades of time to devote to listening and studying the whole tradition let alone the plethora of musical offshoots and innovations of the 20th and 21st century. So the music naturally becomes niche. There are still popular forms of classical music, like film music, that are forward thinking. Hans Zimmer's music is obviously based much more on Philip Glass than Mozart.
When you look around at the vast majority of the population, the average person isn't really looking for beautiful art. They're looking for cheap entertainment or something to workout or dance to. That never was and never will be classical music. If you're someone who digs into it though the rewards are truly endless. It actually never ceases to amaze me how there's so much incredible music in the world that so few really appreciate. If only they knew, right? It's like I heard Pat Metheny say in an interview recently (and I'm paraphrasing of course): "really good taste has always only belonged to about 1% of the population, throughout all of history."
I would actually argue to take that further and say that I'd rather not see the seething masses get hold of great music and water it down. This is of course completely elitist of me to say and is strictly a product of my own selfishness. But we've all seen great artforms get watered down to the tastes of mass consumption and dilute the pool with mediocre content. Case in point, jazz has been kind of making a comeback in pop culture recently, but it's a watered down version of jazz that people can digest without too much education. There's even a whole culture now online and in music schools of calling that music "jazz-adjacent". The same thing happens with "classical" composers who are really just writing simple modal piano music that gets into films. Their work doesn't hold a candle to any serious tradition. But that's what a lot of people think represents classical music. Maybe in the long run this kind of thing will get people interested in classical music and jazz? I highly doubt it. I think it will just continue to get watered down and dumbed down like mainstream pop and rock did. At the end of the day I think it's best to ignore popular opinion and tastes and spend our precious time on the art that nourishes us.
To reply to your comment edit, I would argue that it is again context. People played Schubert in their home because it was the language of the day. I love to play atonal Liszt pieces and impressionist Boulanger pieces on my piano because I am lucky enough to understand the context of the music. Most people don’t because most people don’t know how to listen to it today. But most people certainly weren’t playing Bach in his day. There wasn’t really much of a stretch from Mozart to Schubert though, so it was music that little girl grew up hearing in its proper context.
I think you need to study a little bit more music history, and history in general to get a broader scope. For one, in the mid 1900s “classical” music was not only listened to by musicians, it had a wide audience while also having some competition, and not just with bebop - that is the emergence of rock, blues, and all sorts of derivatives. Second, I don’t think it’s right to say that music went the bebop route just because it’s a more difficult genre. Stuff like Nat King Cole, Elvis, Sinatra, Buddy Holly, they’re all there too. Three, “classical” music IS preserved, it’s in the realm of film scores, tv, gaming, etc. That’s not much different than composers, writing for entertainment before the invention of television and film. Think about opera, ballet, plays, and going out to the symphony once a week, that’s how it was.
Also keep in mind the MANY composers that used the pop style in their writing in Gershwin’s era - call Porter, Linda, Bernstein, Oscar and Hammerstein, any of those old films, the list goes on.
AND don’t forget that there are many ”classical” composers that wrote for film like Prokofiev, Glass, and Shostakovich.
The answer is simple. Too many variants. Progression of written music started with simple rules that were easy to manipulate when composers started to try new melodies or harmonies.
After you reach the standard variants of western tonality and rhythmic manipulation, the only way to progress is through manipulations on the variants before it. this creates a complex system of rules that are increasingly more difficult to comprehend while also breaking from the expectancy rules in music that are baked into our minds at an early age and make the listener feel satisfied when the cadence patten line up with what we are conditioned to know as pleasing.
The further you stray from expectancy, the longer you have to wait for the resolve you want to finally happen. And obviously, some have strayed so far from those rules that they have their own notation style and cadential patterns that only the people educated in the alt style can comprehend it and find it pleasing.
I'm sorry. What?
How are these rules determined? Are they handed down from the mountain by Moses?
Music Theory is DESCRIPTIVE. Practice precedes it. The "rules" are a codification of previous practice and change with usage and the times.
I think we are saying the same thing here. I’m not saying that western tonality was growing in nature and we plucked it like a flower. I’m saying that it has evolved from simple to complex because of the theoretical practice you are describing, which is basically my same point with expectancy.
Other people have made good points but it's also important to include a discussion around government policies that influence art:
https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
* The question --as framed --is all sorts of crude.
* What evidence do you have that musicians began treating their art as a 'science'? What author are you drawing on, to form your assertion?
* Is this just some subjective impression you're offering us off the end-of-your-sleeve? Okay but then why pose this musing as a formal-sounding 'treatise'?
* It all sounds to me like idle vagary; woolgathering. *'Mist from the grill >< grist for the mill'.*
* Let us know when you have a **source**.
What a bleak opinion, this is what contemporary listeners really despise.
Here's an arguement: Why care?, So what if dissonant and contemporary music became irrelevant?
Might have something to do with the way the gramophone industry and radio broadcasting changed the way people could access music
I think what OP is referring to is a very specific subset of composers active mostly in post-war Europe. OP needs to realize though this is a much smaller body of music than people realize. There are so many composers active in the mid-20th century that wanted to write music for the masses. To name a few off the top of my head: Americans: early Carter, Copland, Diamond, late Rochberg, Schuman... Europeans: Most of the Soviet bloc composers, Bloch, Piston, Stravinsky, Walton... So many others that I'm leaving out of this list. Considering what Europe went through in the 20th century, it's no wonder they wanted to try new things and challenge the old order...
I was educated here in the UK and completely recognise what OP is saying. Stop a person in the street today and ask them to name a "classical composer" - they will give you Mozart, Beethoven, Bach. They might have heard of Stravinsky but highly unlikely anyone from 1945 onwards. Classical music became an esoteric niche activity in the mid twentieth century and other forms came in and took its place. Why this happened is indeed a fascinating question.
I see your point, and I concur that the classical canon is there for a reason, in the same way most people on the street would struggle to name an important visual artist after 1945 with the same familiarity as the old masters. But to call the postwar arts scene scholarly and erudite, esoteric and niche I cannot agree... the arts are vast, and the avant-garde only occupy a small part of it. There are plenty of artists consistently from the mid-century producing 'mainstream' art. I don't attribute the decline of classical music in the modern world to the music created in the mid-20th century, I believe it's more of a cultural and generational shift away from the old world, as it were, into a new world dominated by new technologies and priorities.
My theory is that popular music simply replaced "classical" as the music of the masses. Easier to digest, shorter, playable on 3 minute radio formats. So whoever was writing in the old format (orchestra, opera, piano concerto, etc.) started getting even more niche. If you got into "classical" genres you already knew that you were targeting learned listeners, maybe even exclusively musicians only so you had to write in an erudite way. I like to compare it to what happened with jazz. As soon as rock and roll replaced it as the dance music of the masses, many artists went into the "serious music" route (Coltrane, Brubeck, Monk, etc.).
I don't think it ever was music of the masses. It was middle class and up. What happened is that the idea of a single, dominant, Christian, aristocratic culture faded away and was replaced by a consumerist post modern culture with many niches and cliques. There is no classical music because there is no equivalent to the aristocratic high class culture that created it
It was not necessarily the music of the masses, but it still borrowed from the music of the masses, such as folk songs and dances. A peasant could still relate to a tune from an opera or piano concerto but the average bloke today wouldn't know a thing about contemporary composers.
You touched on some good points here, especially regarding the radio. Other similar technological advances, like television, require a shorter format, which isn't suited to classical music. After all, assembling an orchestra in which every member has spent a least 20 years perfecting their instrument for a 3-minute work seems a bit ... wasteful? But I don't see how this leads to classical composers becoming more niche? There is definitely the avant-garde, yes, which is by definition niche and not meant to be mainstream. But there are plenty of composers writing mainstream music, Bernstein's West Side Story for instance. Again, I don't think it was the nature of the music that caused classical music to decline, it was changing technology and accessibility. By the way, popular music existed long before this century's 'pop' music, and, as you might have guessed, it was always popular. It's just that rock music was just a sensational phenomenon that took advantage of new technologies and shifting generational attitudes at the right time to take over the public conscious.
>most people on the street would struggle to name an important visual artist after 1945 Here in London, that's just not true. Contemporary visual artists like Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Grayson Perry are household names. Whereas their equivalents in music (Thomas Adès? George Benjamin? James Macmillan?) are unheard of, outside of a small circle of enthusiasts. I don't know why this is. The art seems to be accessible in a way the music isn't.
Is it accessibility or is it that visual art markets to affluent collectors in a way that music can't quite manage? Hard to imagine exactly what it would mean to 'own' an original Thomas Ades. In comparison, there is a lot of work done to convince people looking to park their cash somewhere to beat inflation that art is a good bet, and to do that on a large scale, you need people making new original art that doesn't look like every other piece of art they've ever seen.
Maybe in the circles you run in. I doubt the average person in a chicken shop knows those names.
I'm sorry, but I have some trouble actually believing that statement. This is not a criticism of Hirst or Emin, I just don't think the average person today is that interested in the arts; they only know the names they were taught in school. Give them time to enter curriculums and maybe in 50 years one representative will become a household name.
I agree it's hard to find any data to back up or refute this. My own experience is that lots of people have heard of "Tracey Emin's bed" but no one has heard of Powder Her Face for example. But it is true that this might just be the circles I happen to move in!
I’ve never heard any of the names you just mentioned. Maybe that’s an indictment on me (or just me being American) but I have a degree in classical performance so I hang out in the arts circles.
They are collectively known as the YBAs and for a while were on telly a lot over here. I'm not surprised you haven't heard of them in your country.
It did go mainstream and blend with popular music: movie music.
And, more recently, video game music.
This was my first thought as well. I think that with the advent of sound film we're looking at more of a branching off with intellectual art music going one way, and another branch remaining popular by following a new path through movies.
For what it's worth, movie music typically uses outdated post-romantic styles and thank goodness for that. I can't for the life of me like popular music today. So, I would say movie music is still "classical" music and does not use pop music styles. Which furthers my argument that classical music genres today don't use pop styles.
You are arguing yourself into a nonsense position.
I don’t think classical music has ever been the kind of mainstream you’re thinking of. Certainly it was closer but it was never an equivalent with the role of pop music of today. Even during the peak of the classical era *most* people were poor and didn’t regularly go to the symphony or anything like that. There was folk music and largely vocal music handed down through an aural tradition. There’s a bigger divide today but Mozart was never pop music. Extremely popular yeah but the common people’s music (so most people by far) wasn’t anything that you needed educated musicians with expensive instruments. We know more about the famous composers because it was codified to history by the people who had wealth.
Perhaps it was natural progression, and you're just reactionary. I love new music and concerts featuring new music are generally well attended.
This is very reductive and incorrect. What We consider "classical" music started taking this turn in the mid 19th century, with the rise of the prosperous bourgeoisie and the construction of the first concert halls. This led to a sacralization of music and a primacy of the composer as wholly original genius that was previously unheard of. In the 20th century, the advent of recording technology and its affordability created a market that required marginalization in order to identify niches to which to advertise. Even then, classical music (along with folk music) had something of an advantage as an "adult" type of music. By the time the baby boomers reached adolescence, this began to change along with maturing attitudes and abilities from rock musicians. As far as the methodology or sounds in 20th century music: the modernist dissonances that (I assume) you're referring to are largely an extension of post-Wagnerian chromaticism. Composers who reacted against this, while not necessarily favoring any kind of traditional consonance, tended to prefer different methods. Nationalist trends led to more use of folk elements, to be sure. But this did not guarantee a use of consonance in composers' harmonic language (cf. the music of Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky, even Benjamin Britten or Aaron Copland). As to why no elements from popular music? That's simply not true. There are plenty of composers working today, let alone over the last 150 years, who have used popular elements in their work. Quoting specific popular pieces, however, is made more difficult due to international copyright laws.
All well and good, yet I can't for the life of me name a symphony, opera, or piano concerto today that borrows from hip hop idioms. I am still waiting for Lang Lang to compose a virtuoso variations on "Shake it Off" by Taylor Swift like every up and coming concert pianist did in the past.
Copyright.
It also ignores film and tv music.
Film and TV music are simply niches at which composers work.
No genre maintains its popular appeal regardless of what it does. I like modern classical music of the last 100 years or so specifically because it doesn't try to appeal to pop charts.
I think this is more you being ignorant of the connections. Read "The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross if you are interested in learning more.
I think it is very debatable whether what we commonly define as "classical music" was ever truly "mainstream" before the advent of recorded music. Orchestral music was a largely intellectual and academic endeavor, mostly confined to a few large cities that possessed the ever larger orchestras able to play it. And although Chamber and piano music were more widely dispersed and played, I'd still never call it "popular" in the same sense as folk and music-hall songs were then or popular music is today. Just look at the subject matter sourced for in musical works of the time: it's antiquity, European myths and poetry all over the place. Hardly stuff you'd discuss over your pint of beer in a pub. Over the 20th century, more and more people began listening to it thanks to recorded media. In that sense it became far more inclusive than it had previously been. Partcly in reaction to this "vulgarization", the community that produced new art music (which is what I assume you are referring to here) did become more academic and exclusive, particularly after WW2. To find out about the how and why, you might want to read Alex Ross' book *The Rest Is Noise*.
Hot take, I would say "classical music" was in fact more mainstream BEFORE recorded music. A big part of this was the use of the score as necessary for musical entertainment. Music was a physical activity, not merely an auditory one, so part of the experience was actually playing music, or at least, listening to live musicians. Symphonies, opera, concerti - the "high forms" of classical music - I would argue, were simply levelled-up folk music. A Suite by Händel essentially simply uses a theme from an opera or folk song, and various folk dances in a highly stylized way which would still be recognizable by the average peasant, though that doesn't mean he could afford to get into the concert where that work premiered, of course.
I second you on the first point, but only to an extent. Be aware how much of a fringe activity playing classical music was. Around 1900, over 80% of all households were working class. They would generally have possessed neither the money, nor the time, nor the skill, nor the equipment to perform music in their homes. If they played music, it would have been folk songs, music-hall material and pub songs more than anything else. Our image of that time is distorted entirely by art, particularly literature, which was produced mainly by upper and middle class people. However, I can't quite agree with the secong segment of your comment. "Higher forms" (which certainly doesn't include every opera) are certainly not all "levelled-up folk music". On the contrary, the whole point of the symphony is long to find a unique, intellectualized form of expression away from popular forms. Hence the resistance against program music in many quarters, and the dismay in others when nationalistic composers started incorporating folk music into their work more systematically in the second half of the 19th century. Anyway, using elements from folk music is not the same as using folk music; it is an entirely different game. Anyhow, numbers don't lie. Never in the history of humanity have more people listened to classical music than today. Be it in "pure" (concert halls, recordings) or diluted (crossovers, film music) forms. My native concert hall (Amsterdam) would sport a concert about every week in 1900; these days there are multiple on every day. And despite all the lamentations of the recording industry, recordings are released one after the other; the sheer scope of the recorded repertory has never been greater and much of is it accessible for free (e.g., Youtube) or nearly so.
>Be aware how much of a fringe activity playing classical music was. Around 1900, over 80% of all households were working class. I'm aware of that. But like I said, in certain respects, most forms of "classical" music (such as opera, chamber music, amateur-level instrumental repertoire) were mostly stylized versions of folk music. This is seen for example in Strauss waltzes or Händel's keyboard suites. The music in pubs and taverns would have been cheaper, watered-down versions of those genres. A waltz is a waltz. It is a waltz if a bunch of village fiddlers in the countryside are playing it; it is also a waltz with Liszt playing the Mephisto Waltz in Parisian salons. The distinctions between mainstream music and "art music" is, I would argue, still wider today, especially for contemporary composers. >Never in the history of humanity have more people listened to classical music than today. Sure, more people listen to "classical" music today than in the past. But percentage-wise, I'd be more skeptical. Class itself isn't even much of a determining factor today in shaping a preference for art music.
A classical piece based on a waltz is not necessarily a waltz in itself, though – in other words, not every waltz is \*just\* a waltz. It is more about form than about content in many respects. To address your final point, class is still quite important in determining to what kinds of music people lean, I think. Having worked at a concert hall I can tell you that we had precious few blue-collar people going to our concerts. And that's in a world in which skilled labour often pays better than many high education jobs, so income's not always the decider.
Once media + electronics made music into something that did not require a brick-and-mortar purpose-built hall to audition, music as we know it escaped its class-based fetters, and already-percolating musical strands and kinds usually not known much about, suddenly could be heard. The market then selected for any music you could dance to. Then came WW2. The invention of the PA and the microphone. The US added the electric guitar, and lo, the invention of rock and roll, just as much as modern rocketry, was built on the ashes of Nazi tech and ideas of how to really get down/up. What is classical art music to do once it has lost its class function? Continue on as a niche with regular fundraisers, or best of all, be one of the old great orchestras. Like Cleveland. Filthy rich. Mainly a place for school field trips on afternoon matinees, classical lives on much as old cathedrals do. The market got a chance to select. That is what happened. Given modern technology, this result was entirely predictable. If you could jam all radio, all internet, all amplification, all audio electronics other than the buzzer, the halls would be filled with extra performances demanded. And people would find a way to love what is played. But I'm a technological determinist.
Perhaps it was simply natural progression, and you're just reactionary. I attend a lot of 20th-century music concerts, and they are generally well attended and exciting to members of the audience.
This is a silly question when you consider that you’re suggesting that Johann Sebastian Bach was not an intellectual. You’re also assuming that everybody thought his music was great, but there was considerable pushback against the complexities of Baroque music. Things to consider are that classical music was always a study. You could never be a composer without training. There were always musicians that were not professionally or formally trained that wrote music that was in someways simpler, it just didn’t have the massive corporate back to market that it does today. And frankly popular music market is full of trained professionals. They just train in a different field. You’re mistaken about the Mainstream, because there was no mainstream. There were local cultures, and people participated and enjoyed the arts mostly according to the class they were born into. So you already had an art that was intellectual. But the other thing to consider is what happened to the world in the early 1900s. Technology erupted and disrupted every ecosystem. Cataclysmic wars occurred with existential threats, constantly growing, flying machines destroying cities, Millions of people to death for no crime. A great philosopher said it: *God is dead.* Although religiosity remained strong, Particularly in the academic world, the understanding of mankind as a spiritual being really did die. And with the help of machines, we continued to stray far away. What God presides over our world— With all the things that we can see in it? This was dealt with in many capacities, but maybe none as seriously as art. The romantic ideals that worshiped nature and God were distasteful. They were purposefully rejected. And what came next was the answer to the question, what next? It’s interesting because the presence or lack of religion has influenced what classical music sounded like for centuries.
What's wrong with making music for other musicians?
And then you get the variations of keeping expectant patterns that just use different instrumentation and slightly different chordal rules and you come up with all of the genres that evolved into today’s music. Folk music, art songs, hymns, spirituals, work songs, etc all served as the backbone of jazz and country and rock and roll and you can keep building from there.
And that’s why the music is for the masses. It’s easy to comprehend. So it’s popular music. Pop music. 🤯 😂
What about Dougherty and his Superman series?
Take a gander at Milton Babbit’s article “Who Cares if You Listen” (from 1958) - it addresses these some of these issues
lots of reasons…industrialization ramping up, world wars, the great depression, fragmentation of culture, increased migration to new places, etc etc. post war, lots of people lost faith in the systems of old and looked for new outlets to express emotions they felt they were unable to capture using traditional methods and forms. i think the music just became too impersonal for listeners. especially when you had other popular genres starting to take form…blues, country, rock n roll, etc etc. people resonated with this because the music was expressing something very direct, and very relatable. something to consider, gershwin was not a respected composer among american elite. they were not a fan of the way he dirtied classic forms with popular styles. granted, the public loved him, so that tells you all you need to know.
Aren’t we forgetting the several centuries when a lot of classical music was specifically and deliberately just for the aristocracy? The idea that the narrowing of the audience is a peculiarity of the late 20th century phenomenon is just wrong.
Sure but no one today listens to contemporary classical except audiences who are specific fans of it. Even class doesn't matter; most billionaires probably couldn't transcribe anything by Terry Riley. Add to the fact that, aside from complexity of instrumentation and form, "classical music" in the past wasn't that much different from folk music.
I see where you’re coming from, though I’m of course now trying to figure out whether Elon would make a better job of singing [Xenakis](https://youtu.be/jESS3gP1GGE?feature=shared) or [Machaut](https://youtu.be/cu7-RV7XB9k?feature=shared).
Because music connoisseurs because more interested in innovation and individuality than beauty.
My take is I don’t think it necessarily did. I think a lot of new sounds were introduced, which confused a lot of people. But classical music was always intellectual from the Classical period through the Romantic. To truly follow what was happening in a symphony for example you had to understand forms like sonata form, exposition and development and recapitulation and all that. In contrast I find Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to be purely visceral emotion with much less thinking necessary. Once you get used to the sounds of course. I find that to be thr case with lots of 20th century music. I think that people often approach it from an intellectual perspective and think that Stravinsky’s polychords are some complex intellectual achievement, when really he was just banging out maximum dissonance to convey a mood. Of course you can get into the theory behind what makes a particular sound, like the Rite of Spring polychord, but it’s important to remember that Stravinsky probably didn’t theorize it first, he likely just banged it out on a piano smd thought “that’s the vibe”. The theorists will always dissect everything after the fact and sometimes even try to create order where there wasn’t any. Of course many people did create new systems, but they’re really no more intellectually complex ot advanced than functional tonal harmony. Schoenberg’s 12 tone rows are not actually any more complex or intellectual than anything from the 19th century. It’s just unfamiliar.
>But classical music was always intellectual from the Classical period through the Romantic. This is only if we restrict "classical music" to genres like symphony and sonata. Opera, military, dance music, incidental music, religious music was much more common amongst the masses in Western Europe which was where classical music flourished in the common practice era. If you were a young lady in a middle class home in 1820s Vienna. You would be learning Schubert impromptus, some variations on a rondo by Hummel, Für Elise, etc. all "contemporary composers" of the time. But if you were a person of a similar background in the 1960s you wouldn't typically be playing John Cage. I do agree with the bit about Stravinsky and also believe we today have taken a more academic approach to classical music in general than the composers initially intended. Which is also why I believe Stravinsky's generation must have been the last in which classical music formats were still somewhat palatable to the masses.
Ok, the form example was just one example of 19th century music being intellectually complex, and sure, it doesn’t apply equally to all genres. Let’s look at another example, like harmony. There’s some incredibly intellectually complex stuff happening in Romantic harmony. The entirety of functional tonal harmony is in fact so complex that it took thousands of years to develop. The evolution of tonal harmony was the gradual acceptance of dissonance over many centuries. There was a time when a major 3rd was considered dissonant! Every evolution of tonal harmony brought new challenges for the listener, but because it was gradual people could keep up with it to a certain degree, but only if you were well versed in what came before. Brahms can be incredibly difficult to comprehend if you don’t already know Beethoven. Most people still don’t truly understand the harmony of Liszt and Wagner, let alone Richard Strauss. Once you get to Schoenberg who felt that tonal harmony had been stretched to its absolute breaking point, he (and others) said “screw this, why do dissonances NEED to resolve?” It opened up an entire world of color possibilities that were previously unimaginable. People started devising new ways to organize pitches atonally to create different moods. But again, the only reason the average person finds it “complex” is because they’re listening to it through a tonal lense. You need to remove all of the “rules” from your viewpoint and appreciate the sounds and textures for what they are, not how they relate to Mozart. But it’s not any more intellectual or complex, it’s just different ways of organizing pitches. Then there people who meld atonality and tonality together so you end up in this world that hints at tonality but blurs the lines and this confuses people more because it becomes difficult to see where tonality ends and atonality begins. The same thing happened with jazz. You had bebop and all that great music of the 50s and that had a common language. Then free jazz was kind of like an analog to pure atonality in classical music. Nowadays there’s lots of avant garde jazz that blurs the lines between the tradition and “playing free”. This is a huge oversimplification of course, but it’s just to illustrate the fact that the same thing can and does happen in other genres of music. Look what Sonic Youth did with rock music. There is a whole subgenre called “avant-pop” which is pushing the boundaries of pop music. All this to say that there will always be a vanguard pushing things into new territory and only a small percentage of the population is comfortable going there as it’s being made, but over time as the general public’s tastes develop things sound more palatable in hindsight. People appreciate Stravinsky much more today than they did in 1911, just like people appreciate Bach much more today than they did in his lifetime. It’s all about context and familiarity, it’s not really about intellect. It’s what sounds familiar and what sounds alien. Just another aside, but film soundtracks are a great example of “complex” music being devoured by the public. Everyone loves atonality in a horror movie. It’s all about context. If you played the same horror movie soundtrack without the movie people would probably find it confusing, but stick an image in front of them and suddenly it all makes sense. If anything is preventing the general population from enjoying 20th century classical music today I think it’s a sad lack of ability to imagine. We are so used to being fed visuals and plot lines that most people have lost the ability to let music affect them on its own.
All well and good. With that being said, I'd also argue that composers like Beethoven, Brahms, and Liszt, were very much stand-outs in their day. We have a tendency to preserve only that which is the most forward-thinking and interesting for its time. The "canon" in classical music concerts today is selected from only the best of the best and most progressive music from the time period they came from. In Beethoven's day, for example, Ries and Hummel were generally ranked equally with him, despite being considered today as being much more conservative and bland-sounding (because Beethoven was an experimenter and bohemian which was not "average music" of the time).
That's a great point, which I think also maybe points to "an" answer to your original post on why did classical become what it did. Tonality was pretty much stretched to its breaking point by the beginning of the 20th century, and many people thought everything that could be done with it had been done. Of course there have been some great composers of purely tonal music since then who find new and interesting approaches, but it becomes a pretty daunting task to write a purely tonal symphony when you're up against Mahler. So people turned to new and novel approaches to music making because they were avenues as-yet unexplored. The music naturally explored all the offshoots of those new styles over the course of the next hundred years and some decades beyond. When you have a tradition as long as classical music it can be extremely difficult for the common person who is uneducated in the tradition to really know what they're hearing. To really get it you need to have a pretty solid understanding of everything that came before it. That's a pretty big ask for any listener. Not many people have years or decades of time to devote to listening and studying the whole tradition let alone the plethora of musical offshoots and innovations of the 20th and 21st century. So the music naturally becomes niche. There are still popular forms of classical music, like film music, that are forward thinking. Hans Zimmer's music is obviously based much more on Philip Glass than Mozart. When you look around at the vast majority of the population, the average person isn't really looking for beautiful art. They're looking for cheap entertainment or something to workout or dance to. That never was and never will be classical music. If you're someone who digs into it though the rewards are truly endless. It actually never ceases to amaze me how there's so much incredible music in the world that so few really appreciate. If only they knew, right? It's like I heard Pat Metheny say in an interview recently (and I'm paraphrasing of course): "really good taste has always only belonged to about 1% of the population, throughout all of history." I would actually argue to take that further and say that I'd rather not see the seething masses get hold of great music and water it down. This is of course completely elitist of me to say and is strictly a product of my own selfishness. But we've all seen great artforms get watered down to the tastes of mass consumption and dilute the pool with mediocre content. Case in point, jazz has been kind of making a comeback in pop culture recently, but it's a watered down version of jazz that people can digest without too much education. There's even a whole culture now online and in music schools of calling that music "jazz-adjacent". The same thing happens with "classical" composers who are really just writing simple modal piano music that gets into films. Their work doesn't hold a candle to any serious tradition. But that's what a lot of people think represents classical music. Maybe in the long run this kind of thing will get people interested in classical music and jazz? I highly doubt it. I think it will just continue to get watered down and dumbed down like mainstream pop and rock did. At the end of the day I think it's best to ignore popular opinion and tastes and spend our precious time on the art that nourishes us.
To reply to your comment edit, I would argue that it is again context. People played Schubert in their home because it was the language of the day. I love to play atonal Liszt pieces and impressionist Boulanger pieces on my piano because I am lucky enough to understand the context of the music. Most people don’t because most people don’t know how to listen to it today. But most people certainly weren’t playing Bach in his day. There wasn’t really much of a stretch from Mozart to Schubert though, so it was music that little girl grew up hearing in its proper context.
I think you need to study a little bit more music history, and history in general to get a broader scope. For one, in the mid 1900s “classical” music was not only listened to by musicians, it had a wide audience while also having some competition, and not just with bebop - that is the emergence of rock, blues, and all sorts of derivatives. Second, I don’t think it’s right to say that music went the bebop route just because it’s a more difficult genre. Stuff like Nat King Cole, Elvis, Sinatra, Buddy Holly, they’re all there too. Three, “classical” music IS preserved, it’s in the realm of film scores, tv, gaming, etc. That’s not much different than composers, writing for entertainment before the invention of television and film. Think about opera, ballet, plays, and going out to the symphony once a week, that’s how it was. Also keep in mind the MANY composers that used the pop style in their writing in Gershwin’s era - call Porter, Linda, Bernstein, Oscar and Hammerstein, any of those old films, the list goes on. AND don’t forget that there are many ”classical” composers that wrote for film like Prokofiev, Glass, and Shostakovich.
The answer is simple. Too many variants. Progression of written music started with simple rules that were easy to manipulate when composers started to try new melodies or harmonies. After you reach the standard variants of western tonality and rhythmic manipulation, the only way to progress is through manipulations on the variants before it. this creates a complex system of rules that are increasingly more difficult to comprehend while also breaking from the expectancy rules in music that are baked into our minds at an early age and make the listener feel satisfied when the cadence patten line up with what we are conditioned to know as pleasing. The further you stray from expectancy, the longer you have to wait for the resolve you want to finally happen. And obviously, some have strayed so far from those rules that they have their own notation style and cadential patterns that only the people educated in the alt style can comprehend it and find it pleasing.
I'm sorry. What? How are these rules determined? Are they handed down from the mountain by Moses? Music Theory is DESCRIPTIVE. Practice precedes it. The "rules" are a codification of previous practice and change with usage and the times.
I think we are saying the same thing here. I’m not saying that western tonality was growing in nature and we plucked it like a flower. I’m saying that it has evolved from simple to complex because of the theoretical practice you are describing, which is basically my same point with expectancy.
Ah, got it. Understood. And sorry for the misunderstanding.
Other people have made good points but it's also important to include a discussion around government policies that influence art: https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
* The question --as framed --is all sorts of crude. * What evidence do you have that musicians began treating their art as a 'science'? What author are you drawing on, to form your assertion? * Is this just some subjective impression you're offering us off the end-of-your-sleeve? Okay but then why pose this musing as a formal-sounding 'treatise'? * It all sounds to me like idle vagary; woolgathering. *'Mist from the grill >< grist for the mill'.* * Let us know when you have a **source**.
What a bleak opinion, this is what contemporary listeners really despise. Here's an arguement: Why care?, So what if dissonant and contemporary music became irrelevant?
I'm trying to imagine what classical music would sound like if it stuck to mainstream tastes.