The other week a colleague joked about my “out of date” taste in music. It was five hundred years old he said. I found this highly amusing. I had been listening to the symphonies of Beethoven. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major was first performed in Vienna in 1800. His Symphony No. 9 in D minor, the fourth movement of which contains the famous choral setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy and which set nine as the informal upper limit for symphonies for future composers, (1) was first performed in Vienna in 1824. Each of these, in other words, dates to the century before the last rather than five centuries ago.
Unintentionally,
however, my friend illustrated the very point that I made in answer to
him. If the difference between the
sixteenth and nineteenth centuries is that irrelevant then the music in
question cannot be tied to the era that produced it in the sense his criticism
suggests. Classical music in the broad sense of the term can never be out of
date because it is timeless. This is,
indeed, what the term classical implies when used of this kind of music. This is why it persists as its label despite
the potential for confusion (2) even though attempts are periodically made to
find another.
Classical
is not the only kind of music that possesses the quality of timelessness
although it has a firmer title on it than any other. There is a type of music, by contrast, that
is notoriously time-bound. That is the
type of music that we usually refer to as pop.
Note that
while pop is short for popular, pop music and popular music are not the same
thing. Popular music is the traditional
complement to classical music. It covers
any kind of music that belongs to the popular or common culture through which a
society’s identity is expressed, maintained, and transmitted. Classical music belongs to the other kind of
culture which rather than being inward-focused on group identity is
outward-and-upward-focused on external reality and such things as Goodness,
Beauty, and Truth. Both kind of culture
are necessary to have civilization and in a healthy society they have a
symbiotic relationship in which each informs and draws from the other.
If popular
music can be described as the music of the natural popular culture of a
society, pop music is music that is artificially created and imposed upon the
popular cultures of man societies. While
pop is sometimes thought of as one of many genres of music, like jazz, rock,
and country, it is something else. It is
what you get when you apply the principles of industrialization -
mass-production, mass-marketing, and mass-consumption - to music. This is why it is dates from the moment it is
created like no other kind of music is. Everything
produced and marketed for mass consumption has a shelf-life. This is called planned obsolescence. It is an inevitable consequence of mass
production. Unless you are producing
something like food which cannot be used without also being used up, you will
need to sell to the same customers over and over again, which means that you
will either have be constantly redesigning and, at least in theory and the
perception of your customers, improving your product or you will have to make
an inferior product that wears out and needs to be replaced. The same principle
by which automobile manufacturers and software companies operate applies to pop
music which is why when you hear pop it you can usually tell the decade and
often the very year it was recorded.
Timelessness
on the one hand and being intentionally dated on the other are not the only
ways in which classical and pop are each the antithesis of the other. This is one of many reasons why the
widespread notion that the relationship between the two is that of two
different genres is utterly silly.
Neither classical nor pop is a genre, they differ from each other in
kind at a far deeper level than that.
That this is so can be seen in the fact that both classical and pop each
have their own genres and the nature of the genres of classical is very
different from the nature of the genres of pop.
Since pop
music is not itself a genre of music, but a category defined by how it is made
and consumed, its genres are the different kinds of popular music to which the
process of producing pop has been applied.
This process could in theory be applied to any kind of music, but some
kinds of music are more susceptible to it than others. Classical music is the most inoculated
against it. The closest thing to a pop
version of classical would be something like a greatest hits collection of
arias sung by the Three Tenors. When a
previous kind of popular music is turned into pop this creates a distinction
between its traditional form and the form that is subsumed under pop as a
genre. The kind of traditional popular
music that is most comparable to classical music in terms of musical depth, its
extensive repertoire of strictly instrumental pieces, and how it is listened to
is easily jazz which some think ought to be classified as classical rather than
popular. There is a pop version of
jazz, although traditional jazz purists reject is as being real jazz, and it
has a fairly wide reputation for banality. (3)
What I just
said about traditional jazz purists is, of course, true of purists of any form
of traditional popular music. In the
case of country and western music the associations that issue honours and
awards have long tried to act as gatekeepers by granting minimal recognition to
anyone who was come over to country from pop and shunning those who have gone
the other direction in a way that would put the strictest Mennonite sects to
shame. (4) These, however, are thinking of the distinction in terms of style
and genre. Although country and western
has a traditional form that predates pop music in the sense we are using the
expression here, its development from older forms of folk music in the American
South was contemporaneous with the earliest phase in the conversion of music
into a market product for mass consumption, the rise of radio. While if you were to spend an hour or so
listening to Hank Williams Sr., George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash,
Claude King, et al, and then spend the same amount of time listening to whoever
currently tops the charts on contemporary country radio, the difference will be
obvious and the music of the second half of the experiment will likely sound
like it has more in common with whatever is playing on the pop stations, albeit
with a twangier sound and sung by somebody who is more likely to be wearing a cowboy
outfit, than it does the music of the first half of the experiment. That having been said, the irony is that
those who would appear to us as the traditional country artists in this
comparison, themselves for the most part – I think Hank Williams Sr. is the
only real exception among the examples given - had their careers entirely in
the period in which country music was indistinguishable from pop in terms of being
a market commodity. The C & W
gatekeepers, therefore, are not so much traditionalist purists, as those
interested in protecting the product of the Nashville brand of the industry
from the Los Angeles brand.
There are,
of course, plenty of kinds of pop music that do not have traditional forms to
contrast with their pop forms because they were created as pop music. Obvious examples include any kind of music
with words like “electro” or “techno” in the designation. A more interesting case is that of rock
music. Like these later kinds, rock does
not have a traditional, pre-pop form, although it has traditional roots in that
as with its slightly older immediate predecessor rhythm and blues, older forms of popular music such as blues,
jazz, and country were utilized like raw materials in its construction. Unlike the types of later pop that wear their
mechanical artificiality on their sleeves, rock, which when it first appeared
as rock ‘n’ roll was largely coextensive with pop, has strove ever since to
forge an identity that would distinguish it from pop. Since rock’s identity both within pop and in
the space it has carved for itself outside pop, is that of the voice of the
rebellion of the young and ignorant, its non-pop form is not properly thought
of as traditional rock but as the very antithesis of the traditional forms of
other music that has been popified.
One thing
that stands out about these different genres of pop music is that while they
are quite distinguishable in style they are generally identical in form. There are exceptions of course, but genres of
pop music usually consist entirely of songs (5) which, while they vary in
length, hover around a standard average length that not-coincidentally is that
which is most accommodating for radio play.
Here is where the huge contrast between the genres of pop and the genres
of classical is most evident.
Within
classical music, genres are distinguished from each other in form as well as
style. Songs, although they may be
incorporated into other genres such as arias in opera for example, are but one
of many genres and far from the most important.
Other genres include but are far from limited to opera which consists of
theatrical productions set to orchestral music in which the dialogue is
entirely or almost entirely sung, oratorios such as Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion or Handel’s Messiah which are similar to operas but are not acted out,
symphonies which are multi-movement (usually four) pieces composed to be
performed by a full orchestra and which may or may not include singing, concertos
in which either the orchestra or a smaller musical group provide accompaniment
to the lead instrumentalist(s), chamber music which is itself more a genre of
genres consisting of various types of pieces written to be performed by smaller
instrumental ensembles such as a string quartet, ballets which as a music genre
accompany the dances of the same name (Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Nutcracker
Suite for example), and incidental music written to be the background
accompaniment to an ordinary theatrical play (Mendelssohn’s wrote such music
for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream twice, his famous “Wedding March” (6) comes from the second version).
It is pop
music’s fundamental nature as the music manufactured for mass consumption that
both limits it for the most part to a single form, with multiple styles and
stamps it with a sell by date. Since pop
comes off incredibly poorly in these comparisons with classical, it is
important to review at this point what we are arguing for and against, lest
this come across as mere pop bashing. We
began by arguing for the timelessness of classical music against my friend’s
dismissal of it as “old”, which led to the observation that pop is the kind of
music that is dated out of necessity.
This in turn led to the comparison of how pop genres differ from
classical genres, which was made in argument against a widespread but silly
idea that pop and classical are themselves two genres or styles. One of the unfortunate consequences of this
silly idea is that it misleads people into thinking that they should seek the
same kind of listening experience from both.
Someone who wishes to enjoy both pop and classical, however, needs to
understand that they differ at a far more fundamental level than genre and that
they are not intended to be listened to in the same way. Pop music is designed to produce immediate
and easy enjoyment. It is the music of
instant gratification that offers pleasure while making no demands. Classical music requires something of you –
the commitment of time, contemplative silence, and effort to actively listen –
before it yields its rewards. Yes, here
too, pop comes off poorly in comparison to classical, but remember that the
point is that there is nothing preventing you from enjoying both, provided you
keep the difference in mind and listen to both accordingly. A far more devastating comparison would be
between pop music and traditional popular music, since pop essentially subverts
popular music from doing what it is supposed to do.
That
however, is a comparison to be explored in depth at another time. Here I will introduce my third and final
argument, by referring to another conversation of about a half a year ago. I was introduced by another friend to someone
he knew from seminary (a different one from the one I had attended). Somehow the topic of music came up. I think perhaps that I had been asked what my
interests were after having expressed zero interest in any of the varieties of
sportsball. My friend’s friend recounted
how when he was in seminary, his professors had warned about the evils of rock
music and praised classical, and had then talked him into seeing an opera. The opera he went to, however, was filled
with masonic and occult symbols and basically the sort of thing that his
professors, who were there watching and applauding, had warned about in rock
music. Asked if I knew which opera he
was talking about, I answered “Die Zauberflöte” and was extremely amused
to get the response “No, it was ‘The Magic Flute.’”
I did not bother to try and mount an argument about how the
music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was so inspired that it could elevate the
spirit even when attached to subject matter completely unworthy of it as was
the case with his last opera in whatever language you render its title. If he did not already know this from the
music itself, he is highly unlikely to learn it from anything I might tell
him. This conversation did, however,
provide some insights about notions concerning music that are widespread in
certain Christian circles and in expounding those insights I will come around
to making that argument.
Many evangelical Protestants think that there is this sharp
divide between the lyrics that are sung to music and the music itself and that
the only thing that a Christian could reasonably object to in any music is the content
of the lyrics. A Christian, according to
this way of thinking, and I use that term loosely, can legitimately object to a
song that glorifies extramarital sex, violence, drug abuse, rebellion against
parental and other lawful authority, crime, and the like, on moral grounds, but
if the words are removed, can have no objection to what remains except insofar
as it may bring to mind the absent lyrics.
For some evangelicals even this is too “judgemental.”
The origins of this attitude are not difficult to explain
since it is obviously a specifically evangelical version of the phenomenon in
the wider culture of young people dismissing any criticism of their music from
older generation. The evangelicals who
hold this view are responding to what might be called the fundamentalist approach
which is to issue broad sweeping condemnations of pretty much every kind of
music introduced since the 1950s as the devil’s music. In the conversation I just related, my interlocutor
can be taken as representative of the evangelical attitude and his professors
of the fundamentalist. Those holding the
evangelical attitude regard theirs as the more intelligent of the two and speak
smugly of those who hold the fundamentalist view. I have known this to be inevitably the case and
could fill the space I have allotted to this essay entirely with examples. The smugness, I regard as entirely
unwarranted.
It is easy
to be smug about the fundamentalist view.
Sweeping blanket condemnations are difficult to defend intelligently
precisely because they avoid making the distinctions that are the mark of
intelligent criticism. The evangelical
position, however, is not that the fundamentalist view is too uncritical but rather
that it is too critical, too judgmental.
The idea that the lyrics of a song might be objected to on moral
grounds, but that the music itself cannot ignores the fact that aesthetic
judgement, which evaluates the quality of art, is itself a form of moral
criticism. We don’t often think of it
that way, but the standard for traditional aesthetic judgement is beauty, which
belongs to the same part of the order of reality as goodness, the basis of
moral criticism, and which is arguably goodness itself applied to the area of
sensual appearance. (7) Music, of course,
is art made from sound and so is experienced audibly, as opposed to painting,
sculpture, and other forms of art that are made to be experienced visually. The evangelical view requires that such considerations
be swept aside entirely and comes close to embracing, at least in the realm of
philosophical aesthetics, an extreme subjectivism approaching nihilism that evangelicals,
in theory at least, would reject in other realism.
What I have
dubbed here the evangelical view, although the more conservative of
self-described evangelicals sometimes approach what I have called the
fundamentalist view, has in a way that is both interesting and revealing, been
subjected to practical testing. The music
industry, taking the idea that music that Christians might object to on the
grounds of the content of the words can be rendered “Christian” by substituting
Christian lyrics – in the case of the group ApologetiX there is an extra
dimension of literalness to this description because they basically do what “Weird
Al” Yankovic does and substitute their own lyrics to well-known tunes – began
producing “Christian” versions of rock, heavy metal, rap and pretty much any
other kind of pop music to sell to the niche market of Christian youth. This is collectively called CCM – Contemporary
Christian Music.
Note that I
used the word “pop” rather than “popular.”
This is because this could only be done with industry-produced music. It would be absurd to try and create an artificially
“Christian” version of traditional popular music because within such music sacred
and even Gospel themes always had a natural place integrated with more
this-worldly themes. When, in 1938,
Louis Armstrong recorded his jazz orchestration of the spiritual “When the
Saints Go Marching In” nobody lifted an eyebrow. It fit in with the rest of his repertoire
naturally and the song has long been a jazz staple. Indeed, you might find it easier to list the
spirituals of this sort that did not become part of the standard jazz
repertoire than those that did. Nor do
these comprise the entirety of the sacred element of traditional jazz.
Similarly when
Hank Williams Sr. wrote and recorded “I Saw the Light” in 1946, it may have
conflicted with his lifestyle but certainly not his music. Indeed, country music would be completely
unrecognizable from what it actually is, had Gospel themes not been there all
along beside the prison, train, literal cowboy, drinking, pick-up truck, and
cheating themes. (8) Try to imagine
Johnny Cash or Dolly Parton without the religious dimension of their music. Tennessee Ernie Ford would have been almost
reduced to a one-hit wonder. Even today,
long after county became largely popified, the biggest hit to date of Blake
Shelton, currently married to pop star Gwen Stefani, is his 2019 “God’s Country”,
a song about farm life that is packed with references to church, piety, and other
similar themes.
We have
seen that rock music began within the sphere of pop music as rock ‘n’ roll in
the 1950s and then sought to establish a non-pop identity after the fact. The early rock ‘n’ rollers came from other
kinds of music that had a traditional sacred side. In the case of Elvis Presley, he had strong
roots in Gospel music and was indistinguishable from the country artists mentioned
in the preceding paragraph in that he continued to sing and record Gospel to the
very end of his life. While he was not
absolutely alone in this, he was far from being the norm either for part of
rock’s quest to establish its own identity was to jettison the sacred element
of the raw materials it drew from and to emphasize the elements that were least
congruent with Christian faith.
Therefore, when the first “Christian rock” was made in the late 1960s,
in was in accordance with the CCM model of imposing an external Christianity on
a music that had become foreign, and in many cases, hostile to Christianity.
(9) The late Sir Roger Scruton wrote:
Recent criticism has paid much attention to the words.
These often dwell on violence, drugs, sex and rebellion in ways that lyricize
the kind of conduct of which fathers and mothers used to disapprove, in the
days when disapproval was approved. But these criticisms do not, I think, get
to the heart of the matter. Even if every pop song consisted of a setting of
Christ’s beatitudes (and there are born-again groups in America - ‘16
Horsepower’ is one of them - that specialize in such things), it would make little
or no difference to the effect, which is communicated through the sounds,
regardless of what is sung to them. The only thing that is really wrong with
the usual lyrics is what is really right about them - namely, that they
successfully capture what the music means. (10)
What I have
argued above concerning traditional popular music, that in it sacred themes
traditionally and naturally have their place alongside non-sacred and so do not
need to be artificially imposed on it the way it does on mass-produced pop music
and on the anti-tradition of rock the way it is in the CCM model, is all the more
true of classical music. Sacred music is
the very foundation on which the classical music tradition is built. Plainsong, the unaccompanied simple melodies
to which the liturgy was chanted in the Western Church of the first millennium
of which the best known version is Gregorian chant, developed into organum by
the addition of a harmonizing voice, which opened the door to more complex
forms of polyphony which while it initially met with resistance from Church
authorities due to concerns that it would place the text of the liturgy beyond
comprehension eventually won acceptance.
The early history of classical music is the history of sacred music and
after the Renaissance brought a renewal of interest in themes from
pre-Christian antiquity and the Reformation brought about a breach in the external
unity of the Western Church, the sacred remained at the heart of the classical tradition. Mass settings written to accompany the
singing of the ordinaries - the unchanging parts - of the Eucharistic liturgy (11)
were written by all the major composers including the Lutheran J. S. Bach (Mass in B Minor) and Beethoven who wrote
two (Mass in C Major and Missa Solemnis) despite having imbibed
the rotten ideas of the so-called Enlightenment. Oratorios, while usually written to be
performed in the concert hall, were largely devoted to religious themes as in
the examples already provided to which countless others such as Haydn’s Creation and Beethoven’s Christ on the Mount of Olives could be
added.
Even more
so than with traditional popular music, sacred music is integral to the
classical music tradition so as to make the idea of “Christian classical music”,
that is, a classical music upon which Christianity has been imposed from the
outside, absolutely absurd. Indeed, with
classical, at least traditional as opposed to avant garde, we have the reverse
of the situation with pop music and the CCM model. I don’t know why the fundamentalist professors
chose The Magic Flute as the work to
introduce their students to classical music with. BWV 1: Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (How Beautifully the Morning
Star Shines) written for both Palm Sunday and Lady Day which coincided at its
first performance or BWV 82: Ich habe
genug (I am content), a setting of Dr. Luther’s translation of the Nunc Dimmitis written for Candlemas or
any other of Johann Sebastian Bach’s over 200 sacred cantatas would have been a
better choice for the point they were trying to make. Nevertheless, just as Sir Roger Scruton said that it is the usual
and not the “Christian” lyrics that express the meaning of pop music, so the nature
of classical music, especially in the hands of a true master like Mozart, is
such that story and symbolism of his final opera can hardly be said to express
its true meaning.
(2) With the subcategory that is called Classical to distinguish it from say the Baroque or the Romantic. Haydn, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven are the names most associated with Classical proper.
(3) Think of the kind of music that in popular stereotype you are likely to hear when put on hold, or waiting in an elevator, or playing in the background in a large semi-fashionable department store of the type that are now mostly obsolete.
(4) See the discussion of this in Ray Stevens’ memoir, co-written with C. W. “Buddy” Kalb Jr., Ray Stevens’ Nashville (2014). Although Stevens’ roots are country (he grew up in Clarksdale, Georgia), early in his long career moved to Nashville, and ages ago earned his reputation as the “Clown Prince of Country Music”, his earliest recordings were released as pop. He was not inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame until 2019.
(5) A song, as evident from the noun’s etymological relationship with the verb sing, is a short piece in which words are sung. In a song, the instrumental accompaniment is supposed to back and support the voice. A song can be sung without accompanying music. This is called a capella style. The opposite, where the instrumental part is performed and/or recorded without a voice, is also usually called a song by extension, although it does not technically fit the definition. Karaoke, in which a machine plays the music and you sing the words yourself, is one reason why this would be done. Sometimes an ensemble might think a song sounds better without the words and record it that way. This is quite rare in most forms of pop music because it conflicts with the whole making an idol out of the singer which is part of its modus operandi – think of the talent search shows that conspicuously advertise this in their titles – although it is not uncommon in pop jazz. Since this is a note and not the body of the essay, I will provide an example that is not relevant at all but which I find amusing. In 1965 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Band recorded the pop jazz “Spanish Flea” which became a bit hit. It had been written by the group’s percussionist Julius Wechter whose wife had written the lyrics. The band, however, recorded it as an instrumental piece – at that point in time they rarely recorded any other way. For a lot of people, their first encounter with the lyrics came in an unusual way. In an early episode of The Simpsons, “The Otto Show” which aired in 1992, Bart and Milhouse attend a concert of the parodic heavy metal band Spinal Tap that had appeared in a number of comedy venues and was featured by the late Rob Reiner in his 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (Harry Shearer, the voice of numerous Simpsons characters, portrays the bass player). A riot breaks out but Homer, who had driven the kids to the concert and is waiting in the parking lot, is oblivious to what is going on even though the SWAT team descending on the rioters are visible all around him. He is sitting in his car singing along to “Spanish Flea”. That this song would not be likely to drown out a heavy metal concert or a SWAT-suppressed riot is the part of the joke everyone would be expected to get. There is another part, however, in that while Homer could easily be assumed to be improvising based on the song’s title, what he sings are the actual lyrics written by Cissy Wechter.
(6) Mendelssohn’s is the older of the two most recognizable wedding marches. He wrote his second orchestration of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1842. The other most famous wedding march is the Bridal Chorus from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin which was first performed in 1850.
(7) For example, an argument for this point could start with the fact that beauty, goodness, and truth are categorized together as transcendentals, the properties of being. Created being, however, ultimately points to its Creator, which is uncreated Being or God. Uncreated Being differs from the being of His creation in several ways. One is in created beings, essence, that which makes a created thing a certain kind of thing rather than a different kind of thing, and existence/being, which establishes a certain thing as a real example of its kind rather than merely the idea of it, are two different things. In God, however, as our best theologians from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have argued, existence and essence are the same thing. Another difference is that created beings are finite, uncreated Being is infinite. These are ultimately, however, the same difference, because infinity cannot be divided, which is the flipside to the fact that no number of finites can be added together to produce infinity. Expressed theologically, this is the concept of divine simplicity, the indivisibility of God (He has no parts, the three Persons of the Trinity are distinct in Person but are each the whole of the same God not parts which add up to God), which requires that His properties or attributes are themselves not parts of God, but the whole of Him. In uncreated Being, therefore, Goodness, Beauty, and Truth are each the whole of Being. While this is not the case in finite, created, being, it has long been the case in philosophy that goodness does double duty, both as the general standard by which judgements of good, bad, better or conversely bad, worse, worst are made, and as a more specific application of that general standard.
(8) If some of these seem incongruent with the message of the Gospel, remember that in traditional country music these things are treated differently than they are in rock music. Cheating, for example, is not glorified in country, more often it is avenged, or becomes the excuse for the drinking, which is a possible exception to my point in this note, except that country is generally honest about the self-destroying nature of such behaviour.
(9) I will say, however, that the song that best expresses what in my opinion is the genuine Christian take on those who have started this insane and unnecessary war in the Persian Gulf that threatens to escalate into a third World War – the president of the country built on the foundation of liberalism, one of the twin evils of Modernity, the other being communism, and the prime minister of the country which many North American Christians with bad theology foolishly think they owe uncritical support to because it shares the name of the covenant people of God in the Old Testament – is one recorded decades ago by a heavy metal band that deliberately forged an opposite-of-Christian image of itself. The song is Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”, the lyrics of which while credited to the entire band were mostly written by bass player “Geezer” Butler. The final stanza is the most relevant. “Day of mercy God is calling/on their knees the war pigs crawling/begging mercy for their sins/Satan laughing spreads his wings”.
(10) Sir Roger Scruton, “The Cultural Significance of Pop”, https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/31-understanding-music/175-the-cultural-significance-of-pop
(11) These are the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus/Benedictus and the Agnus Dei.
