hey, welcome to 12tone! *sigh* ok, so…
I'm mad.
constantly, about a lot of things, but right now I'm mad about the existence of a genre
called art music.
it's the technical name for the collection of music that most people call "classical",
and if you've never encountered the term before it's probably immediately obvious why saying
that, by definition, this is the only kind of music that counts as art is maybe not a
super great thing to do, but since it's such a common thing among music academics and other
people who should definitely know better, I'm gonna spend the next 15 minutes ranting
about it anyway.
ready?
let's go.
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock)
this video is sponsored by CuriosityStream!
I wanna start by acknowledging that the term "art music" does solve a legitimate problem.
you see, when I say "Classical music", you probably think of Mozart, and that's correct.
Mozart is a classical composer.
but you probably also think of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and maybe even Cage, and technically
speaking, those are wrong.
none of those people are classical composers.
when an academic says Classical music, we're referring specifically to the music of the
Classical Period, the middle section of the Common Practice Era. it's like the Empire
Strikes Back, if the Empire was white European aristocrats.
which, historically speaking, it was.
anyway, point is, the Classical period covers roughly the second half of the 18th century.
Classical music tended to focus on clean forms and balanced structures, with clear melodic
lines and lighter textures.
some composers you're probably familiar with are Mozart, Haydn, and Salieri.
Bach, on the other hand, was a Baroque composer.
or at least Johann Sebastian Bach was: there's actually a lot of Bachs that pop up across
the 18th century, but that's not the point.
the point is the Baroque period came before the Classical one, and focused more on counterpoint,
or weaving different melodies together in complex and surprising ways.
now, Beethoven was technically active during the Classical period, but his best-known works
come from the early Romantic period, which focused on long phrases, emotional expression,
and new, more exciting song forms.
as for Stravinsky and Cage, they're 20th-century composers, where this whole "period" concept
started to break down, and they both had diverse careers, but I think Stravinsky is best known
as a Modernist composer while Cage was a precursor to the Minimalists.
each of these artists worked in a different style, with different goals and different
approaches.
very little of their music would have fit with the cultural norms of the Classical period,
and since academics require precision, we can't really call them Classical music.
that said, while these movements were all pretty different, it is possible to trace
a sort of evolution through their musical philosophies.
sometimes we want to refer not to a specific moment in time, but to the entire history
of the tradition, and that's what the term "art music" lets us do.
it's a way of setting aside the concerns of any particular period and categorizing them
by their shared cultural origins, which is useful, but implying that what makes those
origins unique is that they alone represented the pursuit of great art is garbage.
it's nonsense.
stop saying it.
but if it's so bad, where did it come from?
well, like most things wrong with modern musical discourse, we can trace this back to 19th
century Germany.
or, actually, let's go back a bit further: for much of European history, the main way
of categorizing music was by function.
you had drinking songs, worship songs, dance songs, fancy dance songs, you get the picture.
point is, these cultures didn't have a strong sense of what Dr. Lydia Goehr calls the work-concept.
this is the idea that a piece of music exists as an abstract work, separate from the specific
context of its performance, and prior to the late 18th century, it wasn't really a thing
in Europe, at least not in any form we'd recognize today.
obviously that changed, but why?
well, like any major cultural shift, the development of the modern work-concept was influenced
by all sorts of factors, but according to Dr. Matthew Gelbart in his book The Invention
Of "Folk Music" And "Art Music", one of the biggest reasons was the rise in nationalism.
across Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century, there was an increased interest in
establishing unified national identities, and if music was gonna be a part of that,
then we needed to care less about a song's function and more about its origin.
if you can figure out who did a thing first, that tells you who it belongs to.
it lets you identify the kinds of music that are a part of your national heritage.
this focus on origin led to a new set of categories.
on the one hand, you have vernacular music.
this is music that's collectively owned by the entire culture.
it has no single author, and new artists can take and modify it as they see fit.
like, take Londonderry Air.
this is the traditional Irish folk song whose melody was borrowed for Danny Boy, and we
have no idea who wrote it.
it was first published in 1855 by George Petrie after being collected by Jane Ross, but Ross
didn't compose it.
she just transcribed what she heard from an unnamed musician.
actually, while digging up sources for that, I found that the story of Londonderry Air
is a pretty interesting one, and there's some question as to its exact place in Irish folk
music, but to avoid getting completely off-topic, let's focus on the important point: Londonderry
Air is a piece of vernacular music.
it evokes Irish musical culture, but not any specific composer, and each new artist that
approaches it is free to adapt it to their needs.
on the other hand, you have cultivated music.
this is music made by a specific composer, reflecting their individual craft.
Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is cultivated: we know who wrote it, and most performances
of it stick pretty close to his original instructions.
cultivated music tends to carry a sense of artificialness to it: Nachtmusik isn't a natural
expression of German musical culture, it's an imposition of Mozart's will on that culture.
whether that's good or bad is up to you, but this distinction between the natural and the
artificial would soon become a pretty big deal.
before we get there, though, I should note that both vernacular and cultivated music
reflect the developing work-concept.
this is easy to see on the cultivated side, since the whole idea is honoring and reflecting
the vision of a singular composer, but vernacular music was just as much about the origin of
the work.
while we'll never know for sure who wrote Londonderry Air, we still know that it's deeply,
fundamentally Irish, and when we hear it in any of its variations, we recognize it as
representing the same piece of music.
now, you may think that art music is just another name for cultivated music, but that's
not quite right.
according to Dr. Gelbart, it's more accurate to say that art music is the synthesis of
the two categories, combined with the emerging Romantic concept of the genius. in effect,
a genius composer wrote cultivated music that achieved the naturalistic qualities of vernacular
music, replacing the formal rules of the cultivated tradition with higher rules of individual
artistic expression.
whereas a cultivated composer's work sits outside the vernacular, a genius's work is
embedded within it, both responding to and shaping the cultural tradition.
the concept of art music arose to describe these sorts of composers and their supposedly
visionary works, and it gained in popularity throughout the Romantic period, eventually
incorporating older composers like Bach whose works seemed to fit that mold as well.
but if art music is the cultivation of a vernacular tradition, then we need to acknowledge that's
happened in more places that just Europe.
like, take jazz.
jazz grew out of the vernacular music of the blues through the tradition of ragtime, and
over the last century became more formalized, structured, and individual thanks to figures
like Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane.
it's not the exact same trajectory as European art music, and it still has a different relationship
with the work-concept, but overall the story is pretty recognizable. and yet when we say
"art music", we rarely mean jazz.
but the idea that jazz should count as art music has already been around for decades,
so let's try a more controversial example: hip-hop. hip-hop began as a vernacular form
of lyrical improvisation in urban Black communities, and over time cultivated its own stylistic
conventions with increasing depth and complexity, guided by pioneers like Grandmaster Flash,
Rakim, and J Dilla.
these days, artists like clipping, Backxwash, and Kendrick Lamar are doing really interesting,
experimental stuff with the genre, engaging with its history and helping shape its future.
it has all the hallmarks of an art music tradition, but even academics who literally study hip-hop
probably wouldn't describe it that way.
it just feels… wrong, somehow.
I'll give you a couple seconds to consider why that might be.
got it? alright, so here's the thing: generally, when we say "art music", we don't really mean
anything as abstract as the cultivation of vernacular tradition or whatever.
what we mean is the music of white European aristocrats, and later music derived from
it.
the category of art music has nothing to do with style or sound and everything to do with
power.
the idea that Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C Major is the same kind of music as Terry
Riley's In C only makes sense if you don't actually listen to either one.
this is why I think it's so important to understand how the concept developed: on the scale of
human history, the category of "art music" is a relatively recent invention, but we all
grew up with it, so it's easy assume that's just the way things always were.
we as musicians forget the extent to which we're still living in the shadow of the Romantics.
now, that's not to say that every one of their ideas was bad: there's plenty of Baroque-era
things I definitely wouldn't want to see make a comeback, but we have to understand that
the way we talk about music isn't some law of nature.
it's a choice some randos made a couple hundred years ago, and we can and should consider
choosing differently today.
but maybe I'm being too harsh.
I'm sure I've already got plenty of comments from people very calmly explaining that I'm
overreacting and "art music" is actually just a neutral descriptor, but if that's true,
what does it describe? in researching this video, I found a lot of attempts to define
away the problems with the term by giving it a specific, objective-sounding meaning,
so let's take a look at those.
the first and most common definition is that art music refers to serious, complex music
that rewards close listening.
with that in mind, here's a clip from An Infinite Regression, by Animals As Leaders: (bang)
it's dense, intricate, and without prior experience with the style it's pretty impenetrable, and
yet djent doesn't usually fall under the umbrella of art music.
that's because this definition doesn't actually exist to define the boundaries of the term:
it exists to reify and uphold the superiority of the things we already use it to describe.
how do I know that?
ok, fine, I'll let you in on a little secret the music theory establishment doesn't want
you to know: almost all styles of music reward close listening.
shh, don't tell. or, ok, maybe not, like, hold music, but every culturally relevant
genre has its own form of complexity.
if it didn't, people would get bored and move on.
sometimes that means difficult rhythms, sometimes it's layered orchestration, sometimes spicy
chords, and sometimes it's just really good lyrics, but there's always something worth
listening for.
if you can't find it, you're probably not looking in the right place.
I wanted to start with this definition because, and I cannot stress this next point enough,
this is what people hear when you say "art music".
I'll get into the less judgmental definitions in a minute, but as I'm talking about them,
I want you to remember that, for most people, the term "art" is itself a value judgment.
if that's not what you're trying to say, maybe you should use a different word to say it.
anyway, another common definition is that art music is music based on a written tradition,
rather than an oral one. and this is a meaningful distinction: written music tends to be static,
while oral music is dynamic.
in an oral tradition, every performance of the piece also changes it by influencing future
interpretations, but in a written one, the piece remains the same because you keep a
clear record of the original intent.
the thing is, though, we already have a term for the tradition of written music: we call
it written music.
we don't need to bring art into it.
this definition has also been complicated by the invention of audio recording technology:
these days, popular music has that same static, preserved quality, but it's preserved not
in abstract notation, but as a literal sonic record.
there's an official original source for, say, Purple Rain, and we can always refer back
to it to see what Prince wanted the song to sound like.
if anything, that record is more detailed than a score, making it even more static,
and yet somehow if it's recorded, it's not art.
sure.
next, we have the idea that art music is music that expresses an idea.
this feels to me like a more weaselly version of the "rewards close listening" thing, but
ok, let's give it a shot.
there's so many counterexamples that I'm not even sure where to start, but since it's been
in the news recently, consider Montero, by Lil Nas X. by any reasonable metric, it's
a piece of popular music: it's a heavily-marketed song by a major artist, and it adheres pretty
well to the stylistic conventions of modern hip-hop. but from the lyrics, the name, the
music video, and the way he talked about it on twitter, it's clear that the song is also
a young Black gay man claiming the power of his own identity.
it's a personally important piece of musical expression guided by a clear artistic vision,
and it makes a powerful, unambiguous statement.
but let's give this definition the benefit of the doubt and say that it has to be a musical
idea.
I don't know that I'm willing to concede the claim that a song's narrative isn't a part
of its musical identity, but for the sake of argument, let's say it's not.
in that case, I'd point to pretty much any guitar solo by Tom Morello. in rock, most
guitar solos follow the same basic formula: you start low and slow, build to fast and
high, and along the way show off as much of the blues scale as you know how to play.
but Morello is different.
check this out.
(bang) believe it or not, that's a guitar.
instead of picking the strings, though, he's rubbing them with the palm of his hand while
playing around with the pickups. and Morello's solos are full of these sorts of extended
techniques.
he's exploring the boundaries of his instrument as a tool for sonic expression, and yet, because
Rage Against The Machine has a couple platinum albums, he's considered a popular musician,
not an artist.
then there's the idea that art music is music the audience observes but doesn't participate
in.
like, you know that thing where a rock singer will hold the mic out to the crowd during
the chorus to invite them to sing along for a couple lines? that doesn't really happen
in opera.
this separation of the audience and the work allows it to maintain some abstract sense
of purity, unsullied by the whims of the unwashed masses, but it's also… not historically
accurate?
like, a lot of the stuff we consider art music, especially the things from before the Romantic
period, were written and conceived of as dances. the music existed for the audience to move
to.
participation was the point.
this definition also seems to misunderstand how art works.
I'd argue that, in art, the act of observation is itself a form of participation, but that's
a pretty lengthy digression for a video that's already getting really long, so for now I'll
just say this: I think there's value in looking at the levels of active audience participation
in different kinds of music, but I don't think it's a good idea to tie that measurement to
whether or not the piece counts as art.
and finally, many people will say that art music is music written for expression rather
than profit, usually in contrast with popular music.
this is so obviously wrong that I almost didn't include it, but it's pervasive enough that
I think I need to say something.
now, this is arguably true if you only consider the so-called art music of the 20th and 21st
centuries, but what about, say, Bach? in the 1700s the world of music was very different.
someone like Bach would have been more of an artisan than an artist.
he was a craftsman, hired by a patron to produce a product, and that product was cool tunes.
I'm sure he took pride in his work, but it was also his primary means of keeping a roof
over his head and food on his table.
and the same is true for Mozart.
Beethoven's a bit more complicated: he had patrons, but not in quite the same way as
his predecessors.
still, though, music was how he paid his bills.
heck, the 9th symphony, his magnum opus, was a commission for the Philharmonic Society
of London.
now, I don't say that to diminish its value as a work of art, because I don't think making
money off your art makes it less valuable.
artists deserve to be paid for their work.
patreon.com/12tonevideos.
whoops, how did that get there?
link in the description.
anyway, point is, expression and compensation aren't the polar opposites this definition
sets them up to be.
the idea that "art music" is inherently not for profit ignores that most of the so-called
golden age of art music was driven by professional musicians catering to the tastes of wealthy
aristocrats in order to earn a living.
this stuff served the same basic role as popular music does today, it's just so old now that
we've lost track of that cultural context. and that… actually, that's another important
point: making good music requires a lot of time, effort, and practice, and if you're
not getting paid for it, the only way you can afford to give it that time is if money
isn't an issue for you.
this means that, by saying art music, by definition, doesn't make money, what you're actually saying
is that the only music that counts as art is music made by the independently wealthy.
and that sucks.
so, ok, "art music" is a bad term.
what do we do about it? well, I see a couple possible solutions.
the first is to rename the entire category.
there's some other names floating around out there, with varying degrees of goodness.
like, for a long time it was also known as "serious music", but I don't think I need
to explain why that doesn't help.
there's also "Western art music", which at least acknowledges that other cultures have
their own traditions with equal merit, but it doesn't solve any of the other problems,
and it ignores traditions like jazz and hip-hop that developed in the so-called West but aren't
based on the European tradition.
some folks have suggested "symphonic music" or "chamber music", but these don't work because
the tradition isn't defined by a specific kind of performance: much of Bach's music,
for instance, was written for solo harpsichord, not a symphony orchestra.
we could just go back to "cultivated music", or we could call it "canonic music" in reference
to its cultural status, but personally, if I got to choose, I'd call it "aristocratic
music" to emphasize the power dynamics that shaped it.
I don't think most folks will be on board with that, but hey, it's an option.
the other option, though, is to accept that everyone else already calls it "classical
music" and just rename the Classical period instead.
this seems like the easier approach, since it puts us more in line with what's happening
anyway, but it requires convincing the entire academic establishment to change its mind,
so I'm not holding my breath.
I'm also not really sure what I'd like to change it to: the Formal period comes to mind,
but that has its own implications.
honestly, I think it's best to leave the new name up to the scholars who actually study
this period, but if they could come up with literally anything else, that'd be great.
ultimately, I think there's lots of potential solutions to this problem, but the first step
has to be admitting that it's a problem that needs to be solved.
music academia has a long history of ignoring any tradition that didn't come from white
European aristocrats, and music theory is especially bad. and no, I don't think changing
one term is gonna fix all that, but the words we use matter.
they tell people who we are and what we value, and when we say that only this one kind of
music gets to call itself art, I don't think we're sending a very good message.
one problem with declaring that only one kind of music counts as art is that it discourages
people from seriously analyzing stuff from outside that collection, so to help combat
that, I want to give a shout-out to one of my favorite series about popular music.
it's called Alex Goes Bananas, it's on Nebula, and in it, my friend Alex explores the pop
culture of the '90s and early 2000s from the perspective of someone who's too young to
have ever heard of these bands.
he's looked at the Spice Girls, Will Smith, and I even made him check out Rob Zombie,
and it's been really interesting to see what listening to these bands is like for someone
who didn't grow up with them.
Alex Goes Bananas is just one of the great originals on Nebula, a streaming platform
built by some of YouTube's top educators to give ourselves a place to experiment with
new ideas and formats.
Nebula also produces my podcast, Ghost Notes, where I talk to Noah from Polyphonic about
music.
This month's episode even features a guest appearance by professional music-knower Adam
Neely, and it just went live on Nebula yesterday.
it was a really fun conversation and I'd recommend checking it out. and if you don't have Nebula,
the best way to get it is through CuriosityStream: we've worked out an amazing deal with them
where, if you sign up for CuriosityStream with the link in the description, not only
will you get 26% off their annual plan, you'll also get a free Nebula account for as long
as you remain a CuriosityStream member.
for just 15 bucks a year, you'll not only get access to their full library of amazing
documentaries, including Fiddlin', a really cool look at the history and culture of American
Bluegrass music, you'll also get all of Nebula too.
I still can't believe they agreed to this.
and hey, thanks for watching, thanks to our Patreon patrons for making these videos possible,
and extra special thanks to this video's Featured Patrons, Susan Jones and Jill Sundgaard.
if you want to help out, and help us pick the next song we analyze too, there's a link
to our Patreon on screen now.
oh, and don't forget to like, share, comment, subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.