In the Baroque period, a lot of music was composed for the church, while in the “ Classical” period much music was written for the courts. Perhaps we could look at the financial reasons for writing the music: was the composer writing mainly for economic reasons (popular) or for emotional catharsis (classical)? But this reasoning doesn’t work either as most composers wrote music to earn their living and very few of them were rich, therefore they depended on the popularity of their music to keep food on their plates. And many modern “rock” groups and derivatives (punk etc) – that are supposedly of the popular genre – have a very deep, serious, sincere serious message and often even follow the very “artistic” (classical) aesthetic of being deliberately ugly, shocking, and supposedly unpopular. But no: Mozart, Rossini and countless other “classical” composers often wrote magnificent “classical” music that was designed very much to entertain, humour and amuse the listeners. We could perhaps consider the primary intention of the composer: do they wish principally to entertain (“popular”) or rather to communicate some deeper message (“classical”). What then are some of the possible criteria for deciding just where a piece of music lies on this continuum, or in other words, just how “popular” or “formal” (“classical”) a piece of music is? Perhaps Schönberg, Webern, Stockhausen and other “deadly serious” composers would be at the extremely “classical” end, while some of the silliest, most commercial music would be at the opposite extreme. and with all the different degrees of mixture in between. high-brow and deadly earnest at the other …….
Rather than looking for a yes/no dividing line between the concepts of “popular” and “classical” music we should probably consider the whole thing as a continuum, with cheap, flashy and trashy at one end ……. So much music in fact crosses any supposed boundaries between “popular” and “classical” that this division is often quite artificial. WHAT IS “CLASSICAL”(FORMAL) MUSIC AND HOW IS IT DIFFERENT TO “POPULAR” MUSIC?Īs with so many distinctions that we are obliged to make in life, there is very often no clear dividing line between “popular” and “classical” (“formal”) music.
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