"Classical Music" and other names for it

[Richard Barrett]

Couldn't you keep quiet & just play them a bit off your phone.....?

What, an audio snob like me?

Sometimes I point out that people can find it fairly easily on YouTube and Soundcloud and my website if they want to investigate further. That's one way in which contemporary technology can break down borders between musical genres or pseudo-genres. I think MrGG's story about the children liking Mahler but not classical music is at the heart of the matter.

[Richard Barrett]

I don't remember the term 'classical music' being used much, if at all, in my youth. What some now call classical music was just music. That's what 'music' meant.

Surely that would depend very much on the kind of background and upbringing you had.

[french frank]

Surely that would depend very much on the kind of background and upbringing you had.

Also, perhaps, the era. I do remember the time when my brother started recording (i.e. writing them down in an exercise book) the Top 20 charts: he had a bet with a schoolfriend that The Man From Laramie would be at No. 1 the following week. He bought a few jazz records (not Top 20), but there didn't seem to be a great deal of 'music' around to differentiate into various genres anyway. I can't quite remember when 'classical music' was spoken of - and it would certainly have been in the general rather than specific sense.

But now that ALL music seems to fragment endlessly eg 'metal' there surely needs to be some differentiating term for 'classical music'. I just don't think that (pace MrGongGong's anecdote about 9-10 year-olds), subtly altering the name will make people appreciate it. I shudder to hear rap-type music because the 'rapping' all sounds the same - not because it's called rap (it probably isn't - it's probably hip-hop) but because the sounds are unattractive to me.

[ahinton]

Surely that would depend very much on the kind of background and upbringing you had.

It might, I suppose; I don't really know. Having been raised in a music-free zone, my first musical experiences happened to be late Chopin followed by Roussel, Ravel and early Stravinsky for a very short time before getting immersed in the music emerging in the 50s/early 60s from around Darmstadt and, as such, I have to admit that I either did not hear or don't recall hearing references to "Classical Music" at that time. I was dimly aware of the pop music of the day but wasn't really taking any notice of it and I knew practically nothing of jazz, so it would not obviously have occurred to me to think of what little music I had experienced as being so different in style, content and manner as to warrant being hived off into potentially divisive descriptive categories such as what might be suggested by the misuse of the term "Classical Music". When two or three years later I first heard a Mozart piano concerto I was struck by how strange it sounded, but obviously only because it was so unfamiliar; even then, it did not occur to me that such music might be labelled in some way differently to other music.

So, yes, background and upbringing might indeed have quite a bit to do with it but I think there's also room for different reactions to music having some kind of impact.

[Mary Chambers]

Surely that would depend very much on the kind of background and upbringing you had.

Very possibly. I am twenty years older than you, though (just looked you up), so it could be age-related.

[MrGongGong]

. Would you describe AdsT as "devised"?

No,I would consider it a composition by Stockhausen

I just don't think that (pace MrGongGong's anecdote about 9-10 year-olds), subtly altering the name will make people appreciate it. .

It does have the effect of getting people to listen to it in the first place.
Whether they like, appreciate or hate it might then be to do with what it sounds like to the listener not to what they, or others assume (like Prof Say's Stockhausen syndrome )

[Richard Barrett]

Very possibly. I am twenty years older than you, though (just looked you up), so it could be age-related.

To an extent I'm sure you're right, but it is certainly also class-related, in so far as (what we now call)(perhaps provisionally) "classical music" has never been a feature of working-class culture, that is to say the culture of the majority of people in the time-periods we're talking about. That's all I was saying.

[jean]

..."classical music" has never been a feature of working-class culture, that is to say the culture of the majority of people in the time-periods we're talking about...

I don't feel this is true of my own background in Liverpool in the 1950s.

I sometimes think definitions of working-class culture are made by middle-class people, and sometimes (absurdly as it seemed to me when I first heard them in the 1960s) used by middle-class socialists to berate themselves for their lack of solidarity when they yielded to the temptations of sneaking off to classical concerts.

And I think I remember the word 'classical' being used back then, too.

[Richard Barrett]

I don't feel this is true of my own background in Liverpool in the 1950s.

I sometimes think definitions of working-class culture are made by middle-class people, and sometimes (absurdly as it seemed to me when I first heard them in the 1960s) used by middle-class socialists to berate themselves for their lack of solidarity when they yielded to the temptations of sneaking off to classical concerts.

And I think I remember the word 'classical' being used back then, too.

I guess I'm speaking primarily from my own experience, in that "classical music" was a phrase in use but wasn't what was meant by just "music", as Mary has it. My early experiences of it took place at school.

[french frank]

it is certainly also class-related, in so far as (what we now call)(perhaps provisionally) "classical music" has never been a feature of working-class culture, that is to say the culture of the majority of people in the time-periods we're talking about.

Several times people have contacted FoR3 with the story of 'I was a grammar school boy from a working-class background' and describing how they found the Third Programme (exciting because their parents were listening to the Light Programme and the Home Service). The music they heard was part of a new experience, but in those days there was no 'youth music': music was pretty middle-aged. I remember the 50s as being the age of the ballad singers, mostly wearing suit and tie. It wasn't competition, like the future 'rock n' roll', Elvis &c. The under 50s, under 30s and under 10s are now saturated with commercial pop.

Attractive labels like 'progressive', 'left-field', 'experimental' have been commandeered to describe further developments in post-war popular and maybe they did/do serve to self-define, create an image and crucially tempt people to listen. Whether you can stick a new label on music which, mirabile dictu, is 200 years old, or more and fool people (who?) into believing it's not 'boring classical music' is another matter.

[jean]

...in those days there was no 'youth music': music was pretty middle-aged. I remember the 50s as being the age of the ballad singers, mostly wearing suit and tie. It wasn't competition, like the future 'rock n' roll', Elvis &c. The under 50s, under 30s and under 10s are now saturated with commercial pop.

I think 'youth music' started earlier than that; my own short-lived (and rather half-hearted) act of teenage rebellion involved removing myself to the room where the other radio was and listening in the cold to Radio Luxembourg, some time in the mid-50s, to the distress of my working-class, but Third Programme-listening father.

[Serial_Apologist]

Several times people have contacted FoR3 with the story of 'I was a grammar school boy from a working-class background' and describing how they found the Third Programme (exciting because their parents were listening to the Light Programme and the Home Service). The music they heard was part of a new experience, but in those days there was no 'youth music': music was pretty middle-aged. I remember the 50s as being the age of the ballad singers, mostly wearing suit and tie. It wasn't competition, like the future 'rock n' roll', Elvis &c. The under 50s, under 30s and under 10s are now saturated with commercial pop.

Attractive labels like 'progressive', 'left-field', 'experimental' have been commandeered to describe further developments in post-war popular and maybe they did/do serve to self-define, create an image and crucially tempt people to listen. Whether you can stick a new label on music which, mirabile dictu, is 200 years old, or more and fool people (who?) into believing it's not 'boring classical music' is another matter.

I think there was something of an early 1960s watershed in terms of labelling, which coincided with my own "coming of age".

I underwent the dubious privilege of a public school education - nothing more middle class, you would rightly say - but the air was saturated with pop music. Having had musical parents drove me towards jazz as the, to me, only literate alternative. Trad and modern jazz, which respectively had started out 10-15 years previously as working class suburban blokes playing New Orleans jazz to middle class art students, and working class urban blokes playing 1940s bebop to cross-class audiences, were at daggers drawn - my school mate and I fell out for 6 months when I switched to "modern jazz" after hearing a Charlie Parker track at the school jazz club. I would have been 15 at the time. The older boys, who mostly, as was the time, felt they had outgrown Billy Fury, Cliff and co, gravitated back towards the Glenn Miller/1930s Swing and Boogie Woogie of their elder siblings, but were quickly discovering Black Soul, which then meant Fats Domino and Ray Charles rather than The Supremes, who were heard as pure pop. I played my Dizzy Gillespie Big band LP as loud as I could from one end of the house room to drown out the Elvis coming from the crackly house record player - you were allowed 30 minutes' mayhem before Prep ensued to total silence, eyes down.

Soon after leaving school Trad seemed more associated with ban the Bomb demos than anything else out in the real world, while, until the R&B takeover of what had been live jazz venues, modern jazz had the allure of Soho night life and the criminal underworld depicted in B movie black & white. Rhythm 'n' Blues, so-called, was the poppers-dropping live soundtrack accompaniment to the sped-up life of two-a-penny office jobs and Mod Cool grass-roots-up fashion. All this changed dramatically with the contemporaneous arrival of the "alternative society" escapism young British poets and a new lower middle-class following took from Kerouack and Ginsburg, with Timothy Leary's alternative to speed and Speed encouraging experimentations at the pop/rock end of form, and, as with American Minimalism, in the art colleges rather than what had been going on, even, in Manchester under Goehr's lead, let alone the pre-existing Walton/Tippett/Britten axis.

All this was pretty middle class, as working class kids started turning to Ska and then Reggae after 1964 - but all this was worlds away from any consideration of classical/non-classical generics; before Berio befriended Paul McCartney and Stockhausen went "World", in this country you were considered "square" if you liked "classical", and capitalism's capacity for turning anything novel to its own profitable ends, ("co-option" we Marcusians called it) made sure that the agenda for generically useful categorisation, if not the details, was set in train, leading us to where we now are. If Luigi Nono and his supporters are believed, this was not how things developed in Europe, whichever side of the Iron Curtain you were on: avant-garde works using electronics etc were of direct appeal to the working classes, as (allegedly) Verdi had been to the Italian proletariat a century before.

My thoughts on this are that Modernism, as manifested in jazz and in classsical (or whatever we want to call it) music was, like the much maligned "liberal" education of the 60s and 70s with its emphasis on developing rounded creative critical citizens as opposed to knowledge/factual information regurgitators, was preparing us for a very different kind of world from the one of class, religious and, once again, ethnic division now back with us, but that capitalism, with the Faustian pact it has caught us all up in, could not offer, for all its talk of "freedom" and "democracy". A different, more inclusive society less wasteful of its resources, would have less need for categories.

[ahinton]

I don't feel this is true of my own background in Liverpool in the 1950s.

I sometimes think definitions of working-class culture are made by middle-class people, and sometimes (absurdly as it seemed to me when I first heard them in the 1960s) used by middle-class socialists to berate themselves for their lack of solidarity when they yielded to the temptations of sneaking off to classical concerts.

And I think I remember the word 'classical' being used back then, too.

You have a point here, but then so does Richard and, given that your experiences were different, that's hardly surprising, really.

[ahinton]

I think there was something of an early 1960s watershed in terms of labelling, which coincided with my own "coming of age".

I underwent the dubious privilege of a public school education - nothing more middle class, you would rightly say - but the air was saturated with pop music. Having had musical parents drove me towards jazz as the, to me, only literate alternative. Trad and modern jazz, which respectively had started out 10-15 years previously as working class suburban blokes playing New Orleans jazz to middle class art students, and working class urban blokes playing 1940s bebop to cross-class audiences, were at daggers drawn - my school mate and I fell out for 6 months when I switched to "modern jazz" after hearing a Charlie Parker track at the school jazz club. I would have been 15 at the time. The older boys, who mostly, as was the time, felt they had outgrown Billy Fury, Cliff and co, gravitated back towards the Glenn Miller/1930s Swing and Boogie Woogie of their elder siblings, but were quickly discovering Black Soul, which then meant Fats Domino and Ray Charles rather than The Supremes, who were heard as pure pop. I played my Dizzy Gillespie Big band LP as loud as I could from one end of the house room to drown out the Elvis coming from the crackly house record player - you were allowed 30 minutes' mayhem before Prep ensued to total silence, eyes down.

Soon after leaving school Trad seemed more associated with ban the Bomb demos than anything else out in the real world, while, until the R&B takeover of what had been live jazz venues, modern jazz had the allure of Soho night life and the criminal underworld depicted in B movie black & white. Rhythm 'n' Blues, so-called, was the poppers-dropping live soundtrack accompaniment to the sped-up life of two-a-penny office jobs and Mod Cool grass-roots-up fashion. All this changed dramatically with the contemporaneous arrival of the "alternative society" escapism young British poets and a new lower middle-class following took from Kerouack and Ginsburg, with Timothy Leary's alternative to speed and Speed encouraging experimentations at the pop/rock end of form, and, as with American Minimalism, in the art colleges rather than what had been going on, even, in Manchester under Goehr's lead, let alone the pre-existing Walton/Tippett/Britten axis.

All this was pretty middle class, as working class kids started turning to Ska and then Reggae after 1964 - but all this was worlds away from any consideration of classical/non-classical generics; before Berio befriended Paul McCartney and Stockhausen went "World", in this country you were considered "square" if you liked "classical", and capitalism's capacity for turning anything novel to its own profitable ends, ("co-option" we Marcusians called it) made sure that the agenda for generically useful categorisation, if not the details, was set in train, leading us to where we now are. If Luigi Nono and his supporters are believed, this was not how things developed in Europe, whichever side of the Iron Curtain you were on: avant-garde works using electronics etc were of direct appeal to the working classes, as (allegedly) Verdi had been to the Italian proletariat a century before.

My thoughts on this are that Modernism, as manifested in jazz and in classsical (or whatever we want to call it) music was, like the much maligned "liberal" education of the 60s and 70s with its emphasis on developing rounded creative critical citizens as opposed to knowledge/factual information regurgitators, was preparing us for a very different kind of world from the one of class, religious and, once again, ethnic division now back with us, but that capitalism, with the Faustian pact it has caught us all up in, could not offer, for all its talk of "freedom" and "democracy". A different, more inclusive society less wasteful of its resources, would have less need for categories.

A most interesting and well considered post for which very many thanks!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

A most interesting and well considered post for which very many thanks!