What is classical music exactly?

Today on GB News, I watched and listened to a very interesting segment by Michael Portillo and Julian Lloyd-Webber on what they had both decided to call “classical music”. Like most things on this channel, it was aimed not at the well-educated middle classes, but at ordinary people who maybe don’t know a lot about the subject but would like to know more. While it was an excellent survey of the different kinds of music available (with fine illustrative examples), I found their indiscriminate use of the term “classical’ rather tiresome.

I think that people coming for the first time to what I would prefer to call “serious” music might actually like to know that it changed and developed over the centuries, and that some time periods might be more to their individual taste than others. Certainly I myself do not find the baroque music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries very attractive. I have no difficulty with the idea that J. S. Bach was as great a composer as Beethoven, but there is not a great deal by Bach that I actually like or that really moves me. People who are encouraged by programmes like this to think that classical music is a single thing may well be emboldened to try listening to some music which happens to be written in a particular style, decide that they don’t much care for it, and never try again.

For any readers who might like to dip a toe into these waters, here is how I usually classify music:

• Early music
Anything before about 1650. This includes mediaeval and renaissance music, which I consider to be specialised musical topics. One of the most interesting illustrations in this particular programme segment was a piece by the 12th-century polymath Hildegard of Bingen, who was a visual artist as well as a composer (and a saint to boot!). Music which she had written for unaccompanied voices had been arranged for a string quartet, presumably to make it sound less alien. Surprisingly this worked very well and the effect was not unlike early 20th-century impressionist music. All the same, hearing this music described as classical grated on my ear. Hildegard lived centuries before the classical period in music.
• Baroque music
Late seventeenth century and most of the eighteenth. This is probably the earliest music that is widely known to the public. Think Purcell, Vivaldi, Handel, Bach. Most music of this period was written either for court use or for the church, so it tends to be grandiose and sometimes rather pompous. Solo parts, both vocal and instrumental, are often decorated with improvised frills and furbelows. But the tunes themselves are simple, with very little modulation into foreign keys, other than closely related ones. That is probably because keyboard instruments of the time used natural tuning and therefore sounded out of tune in the more distant keys. Modern Equal temperament, which sounds in tune in any key, only came in gradually during the eighteenth century. Baroque music also used a number of musical structures (such as partitas, cantatas and dance suites) that had died out by the classical era.
• True classical music
Late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This is the music of Hayden and Mozart and the earlier music of Beethoven and Schubert, both of whom straddled the Classical/Romantic divide. Classical music was mostly written for the salons of the nobility rather than for the courts of kings. Because of that, it often has a scaled down feel compared with either baroque or romantic music. It is a bit more adventurous in its use of chromatics and modulation than baroque music is. It was also in this period that familiar forms like the symphony, sonata and concerto emerged. Classical music is elegant, tuneful and often charming. It is also international in that, in this period, the whole of Europe used the same style. At its worst, it can sound like a musical box! At its best, it can handle emotion and even tragedy, but always in the strictest good taste.
• The Romantic period
Nineteenth and very early twentieth century. This is big music, often played by big orchestras. Romantic music is about emotion, what the Germans call Sturm und Drang (storm and stress). It has no room for stoicism or “good form”. In this period, music moved out of the salon and into the concert hall. It was aimed at the general public, who expected to be moved and excited by it. Think Schumann, Brahms, Wagner and Tchaikovsky! The romantic period also saw the beginnings of musical nationalism, with composers often basing their style on folk music, or using folk stories as plots for operas and symphonic poems. In fact the symphonic poem or tone poem was invented by romantic composers. Curiously several of these musical nationalists had foreign roots: the Polish Chopin was of French extraction as his name shows, the Norwegian Grieg was the son of a Scottish doctor, and the Finnish Sibelius spoke Swedish as his native language. And in England, Holst and Delius were both of German stock. As a child of refugees, I don’t find this so surprising. It takes a slightly foreign eye to see a country clearly.
• Late romanticism and Impressionism
Early 20th Century. Strictly speaking musical impressionism was a French movement inspired by the impressionist painters. Debussy and Ravel are the main names here. But I like to think of English composers of this period, like Delius, Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth, as impressionists of a kind. Impressionist music shifts and shimmers, and it’s often difficult to say what key a piece is in. Though it is often very beautiful, there are few tunes you can actually sing. Late Austrian/German romantics like Mahler and Schoenberg (in his early period) have something of the same magical quality.
• Modern music
Music written after the first world war. Personally I don’t like most of it because it tends to be noisy and discordant. Baroque music was written for kings, classical music for aristocrats, and romantic music for the middle classes, but a lot of modern music seems to me to have been written for (and by) an intellectual elite who take a specific pleasure in pushing what the masses hate! I remember someone on the BBC Music Programme (where else!) complaining that no century before the 20th was ever so out of tune with the music that it produced. It did not occur to him that no previous century had produced musicians who were so out of tune with the tastes of those for whom the music was supposedly written. It may have something to do with the fact that modern composers are beholden for their living neither to private patrons (as baroque and classical composers often were) nor to the general public who pay for concert tickets, but to government-funded bodies run by mandarins. The result is a parasitical class who, instead of earning an honest living driving nails home, often prefer to earn a dishonest one driving audiences home!