Or was it ever considered popular music? By “classical music” I’m referring to the general Western artistic music tradition, and not specifically the music from the period bookmarked by Haydn and Beethoven.
Did a music project last week and AFAIK, it came during the time of the baby boomers, rock and roll, First British Invasion.
Of course, it depends on what demographic, for the young…then the 1960s would be where it began but I don’t think it ever became unpopular among older people.
Moved to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Classical music was never popular music. It always set itself apart from popular or folk music, though it took plenty of influence from it. That’s a big part of what defines classical music. “Classical music” is just another way to say “not pop” (which, prior to 1900 or so, meant “not folk”).
It was (and still is, in a lot of ways) designed to be “high art” in which rich people take part (and spend money) without having to rub shoulders with the rabble. This is why your city might use tax money to establish a symphony or opera house, but they will never invest in a punk rock venue.
That said, it is often very good. I don’t mean to criticize the art form as much as the intentions of its historical audience.
Music before the invention and popularity of radio was a lot different since you couldn’t just enjoy it any time you wanted. You had to go out somewhere to listen to musicians, and your choices were limited to whoever was playing in your town that night. In that sense, classical music wasn’t popular the way popular music became after everyone started listening to music on the radio whenever they wanted to.
Also, what you tend to lump into one big category of “classical” music was actually different types of music. While we look back on them now as just old style music, if you were living in the mid 1800s (in what they call the Romantic era), you would have considered things like Haydn and Beethoven to be old fashioned and out of date. The smaller and more limited orchestras of those old classics would have also seemed inferior and cheap when compared to the richer sound from your modern Romantic larger orchestras. Similarly, if you were from the Modern era (late 1800s to early 1900s), the influences of Modernism would have been expected in the music that you listened to and those old Romantic era songs would again seem out of date.
So in that sense there was “popular” classical music in that the current styles changed and evolved, just as they do with modern music.
Things really changed with the invention of new technology, specifically the phonograph and radio. With those, now you could listen to whatever records you owned whenever you wanted, and you could listen to music that you didn’t own just by tuning in different stations on your radio. Music was no longer something that you had to go out for, and you were no longer limited to whatever musicians happened to be playing in your area at the time.
This is also the time period when “classical” music as defined by the OP started to fade in popularity. Jazz and blues started to take over (hey, it was the roaring 20s, what do you expect), leading to the Big Band era. After World War II, blues started to evolve into early Rock and Roll music, and country and folk music also started to become much more popular.
So my answer to the OP is that classical music was popular in a sense, since it was the music of the day, but since you only had live performances available, it wasn’t like modern popular music that you could just relax and enjoy any time you wanted. Jazz, blues, and the later Big Band stuff didn’t immediately dethrone classical music, but that type of modern popular music was on a continuous rise through the early 1900s while classical music’s popularity was fading during that same time period.
NM
I think that the OP, in common with most people, doesn’t realize how widespread popular music has been since forever.
Most people lived in rural areas, away from cities. They were mostly poor, uneducated, and uncultured by modern standards of culture. They had no possibility of ever hearing the music of the elites and nobility. If they heard music it was played by people like them, either local talent or wandering musicians. They played folk music in a literal sense, the music of the folk. There were different traditions for this in each cultural division, a term that’s better than “country” since what we think of today as countries didn’t have those boundaries back then. America has a hundred folk musics because the people from a hundred cultures brought their own music here.
The notion that someone other than elites would listen to something other than folk music emerged with the rise of cities and the growth of a middle class due to the industrial revolution. The middle classes panted after culture and recognition, and thought they could get it by slavishly copying whatever the rich did and liked and bought and thought that mattered. What we now call classical music is part of that. This went very deep. It’s true that frontier towns put up opera houses shortly after erecting a bank, starting a newspaper, electing a sheriff, and pushing the whorehouses off of Main Street. But they seldom saw operas there compared to the number of less classy entertainment featured. There weren’t that many opera companies touring, comparatively, and the popular stuff simply sold better.
When recording starting at the end of the 19th century, the available titles were split between classical and popular music. Records and their players were expensive; only the middle classes could afford them. Same with sheet music, which outsold records until well into the 20th century. All middle class families aspired to own a piano; poorer families - still the enormous majority - had far fewer.
So, no, classical music was never the popular music of the masses. It was always the popular music of the elites, though, and of anyone who wanted to become an elite. That started changing during the height of vaudeville, was hurried by music in the talkies and radio becoming national, and got destroyed by the sixties. Thankfully just in time for me not to have to go classical.
You will get lots of different meanings for “classical”.
To someone with a musical education classical means a specific era of music - as distinct from “early”, “baroque”, “romantic”, “modern” - where modern means pretty much anything after about 1918. But these are all post-hoc definitions. If you were living in the romantic era, you didn’t call the music “romantic”.
To most people, and even people working in the industry, classical tends to mean almost anything that is played on the standard instruments that isn’t jazz or rock. Classical music now can include music composed this year.
You could ask the question - do film scores count as classical music? Composers such as John Williams, Erich Korngold, made a life for themselves in movies. Most people will know many of their works. Heck, the opening few notes of Jaws is as famous as the opening notes of Beethoven’s 5th. And you get composers like Philip Glass. Many movie scores, operas, symphonies, and much ensemble work. But two albums based upon David Bowie and Brian Eno’s work - in the form of Low and Heros. Now are those two works classical or pop?
Is John Lord’s Concerto for Rock Group classical or rock? Before he died, John toured that work playing with symphony orchestras.
My local symphony orchestra has regular engagements playing alongside rock acts. They have also done nights of nothing but arrangements rock and pop songs.
The Strauss family made a family business of Viennese waltzes. Dance tunes for the high society of Vienna. Absolutely popular music. Many aficionados of “classical” music still regard Strauss waltzes as pop music. That said, last night my local orchestra opened with one, before progressing to Korngold, and then Brahms. Popular dance of its time, Hollywood music composer (but much more complex and deep composer than that) and giant of the romantic era.
Before the advent of rock, in many countries the songs people whistled in the street were arias from well known operas.
OK, the point being that there is a very difficult to define line. There is more crossover than many people realise until they think about it.
I’ll posit a line in time when things changed. Radio, and the advent of recorded music. Those two changed the world of music more than anything before. Prior to these, if you wanted music at home, you made it yourself. The big popular purchase was a piano. Of course you then needed to learn to play it. Music was big business, and the publication of sheet music for playing at home made composers money. Popular new operas, musicals, these would make their composers rich with sales way past the staging of productions (which may well have made them very little money at all.)
But the advent of recorded music and radio gave voice to the parallel music scene. The music of the people. Some classical composers are famous for mining the rich seam of folk music. But they didn’t really give it voice so much as appropriate melodies. But radio and the ability to purchase recordings of music cheaply gave voice to this music, and gave it an audience. First jazz, then rock, and suddenly there was big money to be made, and an entire genre opened up selling music to teenagers. Radio stations started to differentiate by genre. New radio stations specifically intended to make money of this new audience and style of music sprang up. (Famously, in the UK, illegally,
operating from boats outside the jurisdiction of the UK government.)
Bottom line. Up until the mid-50’s much music that we call classical was popular. People did indeed whistle arias from operas in the street. Then it changed.
Where did they hear these arias? From opera singers? Probably not. They heard them on the vaudeville stage. Vaudeville had bits of everything in it, including the good parts of classical music.
So lots of famous refrains entered into popular culture, in much the same way a segment of the Overture from William Tell entered it after it was used incessantly in popular culture, culminating in its use as the theme for The Lone Ranger radio show. Few things are more popular or recognizable than that. But practically nobody would recognize the rest of the opera or the rest of the Overture, for that matter. (The famous part is actually from the Finale, “March of the Swiss Soldiers.” As the joke has it, “intellectual” has been defined as “a man who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.”)
Does that make William Tell, the opera, popular music? I’d say no.
Indeed. Certainly in the UK the Industrial Revolution soon brought a new public into what we now think of as classical music, with the employers encouraging their factory workers into “respectable” entertainments by subsiding brass bands and choirs, many of which survive as well-respected amateur or semi-professional institutions to this day. And well before that, the urbanised populace would have had some access to “high society” music, through church music, even if theatrical music and orchestral concerts depended on people with money. And don’t forget that by the eighteenth century, city governments were starting to employ the likes of JS Bach and Telemann to provide music not only for church but for wider civic purposes.
I think you’re right about the economic push towards rock and pop: into the 40s and 50s, there was a degree of crossover, what with the likes of Ezio Pinza in South Pacific, and so on. I’d date it to the arrival of rock’n’roll and the reaction of nice, respectable society to early Elvis and the like.
Another aspect of this (perhaps it also relates to some degree to the economic drive you’ve identified) is what seems to me the relative rigidity of form of the three-minute single, the album compilation and how that facilitates frequent and regular interpolation of adverts or any other content a radio station wants to put in, into a familiar broadcasting pattern. (I remember a programme on BBC Radio 3, its classical/jazz/world music channel, where they were discussing different sorts of music with a presenter from its pop channel, whose first remark was to joke about how the Radio 3 presenter got twenty minutes or more before having to do the next link).
Which is not to say there aren’t more and more crossovers and grey areas now, or that what is commonly called classical music isn’t engaging with or absorbing forms and influences more commonly thought as a popular, or that it’s diminishing or dying in terms of audiences.
Film music is a good example: a far wider range of ears have been attuned to modernist classical musical sounds though film music than the concert hall, and quite a lot appears as concert music in traditional formats, too. And classical music continues to appear in TV adverts, for example, at least in this country. And there’s a whole industry of trying to break down barriers.
Further thinking on this, one does of course need to define popular music as much as worry about what makes classical music. You could make case that for most of human existence, the most popular music has been, for want of a better word, folk music.
And music comes in two forms:
Music you listen to, music you participate in. In modern times, the former seems to dominate. But prior to the advent of recorded music many people enjoyed music as a participatory entertainment. Singing being the obvious component, but dancing being on the borderline. And folk music in its many forms a big part of life. The other big form of music being religious. With the two living side by side for a great deal of time.
So, an interesting question would be to pin down the advent of professional composition of popular music. A time when music was created with the specific intent of making money appealing to a wide audience. We associate most baroque music with ecclesiastical works, but there were operas - even if they were often on biblical subjects (eg Handel’s Saul.) but also much closer to the usual romantic farce we associate with Mozart and Rossini - (eg Vivaldi’s Ottone in villa).
But the rise of the middle classes and working classes with some money to spend. is probably the real rise in popular music. Serfs on the land were left with signing to themselves or joining in a few bawdy ballads, a jig or two with the local fiddler once the harvest was in.
Once you had cities and people with a little money to spare, popular music could be argued to come into existence. And indeed, music hall and its variants likely a big part of that. For the middle classes “classical music” would come into view, and era of a piano in every home. Popular sheet music would run from operatic excerpts, popular tunes written especially for the home piano player, and excerpts from light/comic opera.
But in the background some cities grew new music. Jazz. That is neither classical or popular, but it had a huge influence on both. The advent of radio and recording technology paralleled jazz, and had a significant role to play in how jazz influenced the world.
That makes sense. I think your point that “classical music” (for a lack of better term – I suppose we could say music composed for the traditional symphonic orchestra) being “popular music” until the mid-half of the 20th century is a fair assessment. Wagner and Verdi were celebrities in their times – in contrast, if you stopped the average person in the street today, how many contemporary classical composers do you think they can name? Likely none. Even in the 20th century, people like Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin were regularly featured in the news media. Can you imagine a classical musician today being given a ticker tape parade?
Good point about the rise of Jazz – I do find it interesting that this happened around the same time classical music started becoming more abstract and, arguably, less accessible to the mainstream audience. Mozart is easy to listen to. Wagner may not be as “easy,” but it still generally follows what sounds like (to most people’s ears) the conventions of melody, rhythm, and tonality. But move ahead to the 20th century and you have composers like Stravinsky who start composing music that to the average ear is simply not accessible.
Jazz started as popular music, indeed as a form of folk music, the music of the mixture of races and cultures in New Orleans. It found its way into the larger culture through rags. Ragtime music became a huge fad and was supported by a variety of popular dances. By the 1930s jazz reformed as swing music from large swing bands. For a while swing was *the *popular music, rivaled only by songs from Hollywood.
Jazz didn’t stop being popular music until the bebop reaction after WWII, which explicitly made non-dance movement. You can say that opened a huge hole that rock ‘n’ roll moved into, by providing a beat kids could dance to.
However jazz was a big influence on the modern era of “classical” composers. Even going back to composers you don’t really associate with the dissonance and difficult music modern era - Ravel for instance, and you start hearing explicit jazz influences.
The 20th century is hard to categorise. Despite the difficult atonal and inaccessible music, there were a great many successful composers that were very accessible. Many wrote for film. But one can mention well known works such as Holst’s Planets Suite, or Carl Orffs Carmina Burana, and you will be hard pressed to find anyone who does not recognise O Fortuna, or Mars. (Probably from a TV advert sadly.) Stravinsky only went serial in later work, Pertuska, Firebird and the Rite of Spring - arguably his best known works by a large margin are more folk tune influenced than influenced by the modern era zealots (and preceed them anyway.)
Jazz was progressing at an astounding rate. There was really nothing holding it back. It was like a wave rushing along, and every now and again leaving behind a new sub-genre that would take root and remain. And you got cross overs. Porgy and Bess perhaps the benchmark. And massively successful. Try finding someone who doesn’t recognise “Summertime”. Yet, perhaps because it is considered an opera, it gets claimed as classical music.
Some of the musical influences were curious. The segregation of music on US radio stations and the breakdown of the segregation a famous example. That alone, and its timing had a huge impact on the nature of rock and roll and popular music of the time.
Like I said, once you had radio and affordable recorded music, everything changed.
Yeah, this part of history is a bit of a closed book to me. My parents grew up in the era of swing bands.
I was reading Pete Townshend’s autobiography; his father played in a successful band, and made very good money, until after the war the gigs started to dry up. It wasn’t just that jazz moved on. The end of the war brought about lots of changes and interest in swing faded as much as being displaced. The next generation sought something else, and they found it in rock and roll. Pete’s book is an amazing read, and really brings home the social roots that rock and roll fed into. And the micro-societies that individual groups and genres found a home within.
Stephen Foster was the first American professional songwriter. He wrote parlor songs and minstrel songs. I’m dating the minstrel show songs back to the 1830s or so generally. O! Susannah was a minstrel song that was a craze and sold millions of copies of sheet music. It was a sea change, racially, musically and socially, and in dancing, IOW the beginning of rock and roll. Needless to say minstrel music was a big shift in a movement leading away from classical composed music as “mainstream.” To me this is where “Roll Over Beethoven” as a concept began.
I suppose it’s a niche market, but modernistic composers and compositional techniques did manage, thanks to a certain Austrian, to find their way to mass audiences through Hollywood cinema - quite a few movies from the 40s and 50s have surprisingly un-lush/romantic scores.
There is a difference though, from long-form concert music: what’s emotionally comprehensible in relation to a familiar sort of plot and characters in front of you, is less appealing as an extended abstract exercise without the familiar cues of traditional tonality.
Clearly, as pointed out above, the segregation of genres in broadcasting, and the administrative flexibility of short-form “singles” had a major influence and effect.
I’m sorry, but I’m still having trouble with what you’re saying.
Everything we take for granted in modern popular music existed at a mass scale - in the U.S. at least - two generations before radio. It existed a generation before recorded music. Stephen Foster became famous in the 1850s. He might be considered the first professional songwriters but he was in a line of writers of popular songs for traveling troupes that started before he was born.
What do think changed with radio?