Am I the only one pissed off that traditional Classical music is dead because of pop music and rap?
These days, you can’t even be known for composing music as opuses and sell it on the market. To me its ridiculous and it sometimes makes me demoralized as a classical enthusiast. Your thoughts?
By: EyeHaveU
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By: EyeHaveU
About the Author:
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June 11th, 2010 at 12:49 am
Calm down there….haha
June 13th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
Who says it is? You are making far too wide a generalistion. There has always been ‘commercial’ popular music (just think of the music hall songs of the 19th and early 20th centuries) and ‘art’ music. The latter has always been a minority interest. Just how many agricultural labourers or workers in the early factories in the 1810s had ever heard of Beethoven, let alone name a piece of music written by him.
June 17th, 2010 at 1:36 am
I totally feel you. I hate rap and i too wish the radios would start playing great classics. However, I’m actually starting to get the feeling that our great violins and cellos have not been forgotten. Sure, they were left for a few decades for the interest of funky beats from the 70s to the 90s but the 2000s have taken a turn. These great instruments have been added to many songs to still give it that sentimental feeling into people’s hearts while trying to keep a certain energetic vibe America loves. Yes, a strange combination it seems to be but it really does work for some songs. Like… untouched by the veronicas or unfaithful by rihanna or sober by P!nk or just in general demi lovato. My only fear is that techno (not pointing out any cascadas or lady gagas or anything) will hypnotize the minds of America in the 2010s(
June 19th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Traditional Classical music technically “died out” because there was nothing new that composers thought they could come up with. All the tonalities have been explored to the limits by Brahms, Berlioz, and others… I don’t think pop music had really very much to do with it.
June 21st, 2010 at 11:56 pm
My answer to your question is threefold:
Number one:
Rdenig Male is right. Classical music isn’t dead; it just seems that way because popular music is popular. Popular music has always been popular. That’s why it’s called popular music!
In junior high school music class, one of the pop enthusiasts told the teacher, “When we’re grown up, classical music will be a thing of the past.” The teacher, unaffected, replied, “That’s what every generation has said.”
To most of my classmates, it may have seen that classical music was on its deathbed. But I attended music clinics and music camps, where I was surrounded by hundreds of other harmonophiles my own age. So I knew better.
Number two:
Alex Leaf is right. When anyone complains about current-day classical music, someone else laughs and tells stories of how the Bach Saint Matthew Passion was scorned as “a musical comedy” and how the Franck symphony shocked people because it had–shudder, gasp–an English horn solo!
The conclusion, then, is that the rejected music of today is the accepted music of today. So you’d better not reject current-day music, or future generations will laugh at you, just like we laugh at Bach’s audience and Franck’s audience!
But that’s only inductive reasoning, and you cannot get conclusive evidence from inductive reasoning. Besides, we have already waited long enough for all these marvy innovations to catch on. Here it is, almost a hundred years after Schonberg. That’s longer than the time span between Mozart and Bach.
Hindemith wrote a book trying to alert other Twentieth Century composers to their folly. Atonal, polytonal, and microtonal music is not found in the music of isolated peoples. We can conclude, then, that such innovations are contrary to human instinct.
Hindemith’s words went unheeded. So composers went right on committing crimes against nature and concert-goers went right on flocking to Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn performances in droves.
Number three:
Put the Rdenig Male factor and the Alex Leaf factor and what do you get? Music of the past! There has always been resistance to musical innovation, but never to the point that clasical music of the past was preferred over classical music of the present. So this is the first time that it was impossible to listen to classical music without being considered an old fogey.
June 25th, 2010 at 1:28 am
Classical is bad ass. Keep it alive by working in the medium. I play the piano and enjoy it very much. I’m tired of voice synthesizing, I feel like it’s abused by folks who want to take a shortcut to make money in music.
June 25th, 2010 at 3:40 am
It’s not dead. People just don’t understand that without the western tradition/evolution of classical music, there would be no rap or pop. Classical music essentially *was* pop during it’s domination of the music scene.
There are composers of classical music who are known, you just won’t hear it on the radio too often. There is a great market for composers – the trick is know where to sell your work, how to sell it, and what market to make your music for. Unfortunately, our culture has lost the value of studying music in the public school curriculum, causing knowledge and appreciation of our rich musical heritage to suffer in our current generations.
Don’t despair – it’s still there. Share your passion with others – you’ll be able to influence at least one person, and that one person will share their knowledge…think of it as a “Pay it forward” situation.
———
Pianist – Your attempt at intellectual snobbery does not give your answer much of a respectable quality. You could’ve easily answered the question like a decent human being instead of insulting anyone who attempted to offer their point of view the person who posted the question. I do agree that technology has increased accessibility to the classical genre, but next time you post somewhere, consider actually being respectful.
I guess classical music was never popular in any year, based on your claims that I “have my head in the sand?” I guess I should just throw away my classical training as a clarinetist and my research as a musicologist and organologist, huh?
While the term “pop music” evolved formally in the 1950s to describe the growing market, it is also used to describe music that is and was popular at some point in time. I guess by your claims, Josquin never wrote popular music during his era, so that means polyphony was never popular? His imitators, signing Josquin’s name to their works, were only doing it for fun, not out of a desire to exploit his popularity to make money?
I guess the growth of the music industry after the development of movable type was just…because? Not because it was popular? The boom of sheet music development, making it accessible to the middle class, was just for no reason, not because it was popular? I guess researchers need to rewrite the books of Petrucci and Attaignant’s biographies!
—————
To the original poster, don’t let yourself feel demoralized. Instead, retialiate and show them that western music influenced the development of rap and other current pop forms. Your efforts can open a new world of music for many people.
June 26th, 2010 at 8:46 pm
It’s not dead. I love classical music, and own more classical cd’s than pop cd’s. Classical music will never be dead.
June 30th, 2010 at 4:15 am
It isnt dead. “Leading” recording artists (Cecilia Bartoli, Renee Fleming, Pavarotti (when he was alive)) make huge amounts of money from record sales alone. And they all performe/d too.
I
July 1st, 2010 at 2:09 pm
People these days are unable to appreciate classical music. They don’t read. They are not much into culture. Perhaps more true in the U.S..
July 2nd, 2010 at 6:45 am
I don’t think it’s at all dead; some of the other answerers have come close to describing the state, but with some blaring errors.
To say that ‘tonalities have been explored to their limits’ is ridiculous; just listen to Carl Vine, Olivier Messiaen, Witold Lutoslawski or Gyorgy Ligeti to see continued innovation in tonality, texture and rhythm.
Whoever said ‘classical music was ‘pop’ in its own time’ just has their head in the sand. Western classical music has always been a rather elite and restricted indulgence; a different answerer mentioned the real Pop of olden days; music hall pieces, tin pan alley songs, orally transmitted folksong etc. There has always been a spectrum between accessible and ‘intelligent’ music, what I take you to mean by ‘traditional Classical’.
However, I think you may be closer to being right than you would have been at any time in the past in saying ‘classical music is dead’, just because of the exponential increase in how easy it is to access and share music. Any trio of teenagers with a garage band set can become a small blip of a youtube sensation. However, the digitization of recorded music has been a boon to classical music as well. God knows what I would do without the iTunes store and my MP3 player. By the last count, I have about 15 days and 10 hours worth of music on that thing. Even having this kind of collection in CD form is a feat; imagine trying to access that kind of music library as LPs or tapes, or even as sheet music. This has really democratized Classical music, probably to an extent that’s not entirely visible yet.
Remember the amazing success stories surrounding ‘El Sistema’ in Venezuela? This simple introduction to music for everyone has identified and produced a prodigious national youth orchestra and discovered the world’s most talented up-and-coming conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. It’s not far off to imagine El Sistema and programs like it being able to access the vast digitized classical music world through the internet, and then we’ll see the prodigies emerging from this program diversify from mostly performers to composers, conductors, musicologists etc. This will have effects on the Classical music world such as we cannot imagine. Instead of music education being limited to a very small upper group (and look what it still produced!), it is now increasingly available to everyone, and one can choose what to listen to and what to study.
Pop and Rap are passing fads; in two decades, the small distinctions we make now between genres and sub-genres will be meaningless, and I’ll even bet that all the popular music from the beginning of rock to until something entirely new takes hold will one day be remembered only as ‘20th century pop’.
Classical music, because of the core principal of intensive retrospective self-study, is of an entirely different nature. It continues to build on itself, and what happened in the past is therefore continually relevant. Do you remember the popular song ‘On the Banks of Allen Water’? Of course not, you might say. It was a Scottish tune popular in the early 1800s, and it has since been all but forgotten as a popular tune. However, you may actually recognize it, because it was craftily used by Beethoven as the first subject in Opus 57/i, which I assure would be recognizable to far more people than ‘On the Banks’ is. From this, we see that popular styles come and go, and they may seem to be crowding Classical music out, but this is just the nature of these two types of music. Not everyone can be highly educated in music, so to hope that everyone would come to a great appreciation of the works of Mendelssohn or Schumann, in their time or ours, is foolish. However, I would assert that we are coming into a time in which Classical music is experienced and appreciated by a proportionally (and numerically) larger section of the population. Far from despairing (or being pissed off), you should have cause to celebrate.
July 3rd, 2010 at 11:53 am
It’s not dead.
July 6th, 2010 at 9:49 am
yeah, pretty much
July 6th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
hey its not the rap and pop genres fault its just not as popular as them or as it used to be
July 7th, 2010 at 10:52 pm
yes you are the only one
July 8th, 2010 at 5:04 am
yes you are alone
February 6th, 2011 at 4:18 pm
‘.; that seems to be a great topic, i really love it ..;
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