The Death of Classical Music

Let’s talk a little about the death of classical music. Because nothing pushes my buttons more than to suggest that classical music is dead. It’s my humble opinion that “classical” music has just adapted a new name, place, and time. It’s just as relevant as Adele, and just as emotionally potent.

Now I use air quotes around the word “classical” because it’s such a misnomer. True Classical Music, with a capital C, refers to the music produced exclusively in the time period from about 1750-1820. It’s when people like Mozart and Haydn were active. Now, I love me a little Mozart as much as the next guy, but that music is old. It’s great, but it’s very, very old. We live in a modern day society, right? And there are still some orchestras around playing this “classical” music? So where are our Mozarts and Haydns? Where are the people producing music that speaks to us as a modern generation? And the answer…well it requires a little history lesson.

Near the beginning of the Twentieth Century, composers started to get a little ambitious. They were fed up with the old style and how music followed exact patterns, so they started to push the boundaries of music more and more. This meant a lot of things (levels of complexity in the music started to pick up, composers started doing some weird things) but suffice to say, listeners’ reactions were all across the charts. Some people cheered on this new music, others rioted at the premieres (See: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring). Music really started to push some buttons, go farther and father out, and the audience started to deplete a bit.

All the while, this crazy thing called “jazz” started popping up.

And by the 1950s, we’ve got jazz and folk music and r&b and full on rock and roll. All of these genres outside of classical music. We have the creation of what is now referred to as “”pop music.” Because of a lot of factors, audiences grew to like this music in much greater numbers than the “classical” composers of the time. This created a bit of tension between these two groups. And you can still feel that tension now. Fans of “classical” music are quick to point out that their music is much more intelligent and high-class. Fans of pop music criticize classical music as being lofty, boring, and much too stuck up.

Anyway, this is a huge oversimplification that sets the scene for where classical music went to. A bunch of young kids were raised on pop music AND classical music. They grew up loving the Beatles just as much as Beethoven. And they eventually went to school for music, but wanted to breech this barrier that separated the music they loved. A whole group of composers wanted to create music that wasn’t just “classical,” but was rather true to all the music that they enjoyed.

The answer to this in the 60s and 70s was a movement called minimalism. This music favored repetitive structures, a unifying process to create a piece, and mixed instrumentation (that is, whoever the composers could find to play their music). The sound owed a lot to rock music, african music, and eastern thought. The idea was that you could experience music in a very different time structure―something that hinted at a much more primal and basic human level. Repetition was a natural human sensation that could be exploited through music. A great example of this aesthetic is Steve Reich:

Or Phillip Glass:

Personally, I find a lot of beauty in this music. It’s incredibly simple, but really quite striking.

But how about people that are even younger than that? Members of the new generation? Well, let’s start with one of the most well-known groups, the Bang-on-a-Can All Stars. This is a New-York based group that pioneered the idea of a classical “band.” They have a set instrumentation and tour with new music being produced by composers and artists that want to collaborate. Here is a piece by a Bang-on-a-Can composer and professor of composition at The Yale School of Music, David Lang-

Notice the beat-based structure that sounds a lot closer to prog rock than it does Beethoven. And yet, David Lang is a classically trained composer, one that has studied all the greats. He is trying to write music that he wants to hear, regardless of what kind of genre it falls under.

Todd Reynolds is another name I’ll throw out as well. Reynolds is a composer and a violinist also out of New York. He writes in a way very similar to David Lang, which is to say he ignores boundaries of genre and just writes what he wants to hear.

It’s also worth noting the artists that aren’t considered to be composers in the classical tradition. This means people and groups like Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Bjork, and the Dirty Projectors. These folks all owe a lot to this weird classical tradition, and, I would argue, are some of the great composers of our time. Songs like The Age of Adz, by Sufjan Stevens are just great demonstrators of this.

Besides the obvious instrumentation that owes itself to the classical realm, Stevens’ whole aesthetic is informed by the shifting timbres, experimentation, and the violent energy that modern classical music has.

To mention these artists and not mention their backup groups would quite a travesty. These artists, like Sufjan, often enlist help from musicians who are also active in the classical community. See Colin Stetson or yMusic as great examples. Stetson has toured and recorded with Arcade Fire, Tom Waits, TV on the Radio, Yeasayer, and a whole host of other “non-classical” groups. But he also operates his own solo efforts, which are incredibly well thought out and simply amazing to listen to. They are certainly within an experimental classical tradition:

He uses his instrument (bass saxophone) to its full potential, exploiting it to generate all sorts of sounds that you wouldn’t think could come from a bass sax. This is a huge scores aspect of the modern classical aesthetic―experimentation with generating new and interesting sounds from instruments that simply weren’t made to do such things.

Along the same lines, yMusic is a group of musicians who have toured and recorded with the likes of Sufjan Stevens, The National, Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, Bjork, and lots of other awesome acts as well. Here they are performing with Shara Worden (yet another one of these genre bending artists who are just CRAZY GOOD)

yMusic was founded with the idea of overlapping the pop and classical worlds, an endeavor sometimes referred to as “indie-classical” or “post-classical.” I just see it as great music played by great musicians.

So. Classical music. Dead? Not at all. The musicians and composers trained to be “classical” have just created a new world in music where genre doesn’t exist. You can find these academically trained composers writing just about anything these days, from indie rock to orchestral concert music. Good music is good music, regardless of what people call it. Classical music never died. It just became more relevant.