Julian Johnson - Classical Music

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A Oneworld Paperback Original

Published by Oneworld Publications 2009

Copyright Julian Johnson 2009

This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2012

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ebook ISBN 978 1 78074 141 3

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For my students who taught me much.

What kind of book is this and who is it for? A Beginners Guide it may be, but it wont tell you where to begin. The fact that youve even picked up this book and started to read the Preface suggests that youre not a complete beginner at all, that youve already begun to listen to, be curious about, or are involved at some level in playing or singing classical music. In that sense, you and I are engaged in the same quest not just to know more about this massively diverse body of music, spanning some thousand years or more, but to try to understand it better. To that end, what Ive offered in this book are some frameworks within which classical music might be better understood.

This is not a history of music, though my chapters divide along broadly historical lines. It is not an introduction to key composers, musical works or techniques, though plenty of these appear along the way. There are literally scores of books that will give you an overview of all of this, with glossy pictures of musical instruments, composers and their contemporaries. Some come with CDs of music examples. All of these have their value and use, so why read this one?

This one is primarily concerned with what music has meant to people why it mattered so much at the time, and why it might still matter to us now. Rather than tell a story in which musical style just changes over the centuries, as if composers simply got bored with the old ways, I have tried instead to give a sense of how music has related to some of the big ideas of Western experience spirituality, human emotion, the invention of the new, the weight of history, the self-identity of individuals and nations. Huge claims have been made for the meaning of classical music, framed in terms of religion, philosophy, psychology or politics. At other times, its simply been taken as an innocent pleasure, a diversion or entertainment.

Talking about music is no substitute for listening to it. At the end of the book I have given a list of some key musical works that are either mentioned in the text or would illustrate the points I have tried to make. There are hundreds of other works that I might have suggested instead, so similar works by the same composers would do the job just as well if you find it difficult to get hold of the ones Ive suggested. I have also recommended some books for further reading but these are best followed up in tandem with listening to the music. I have often found, with music that is new to me, that listening to it provokes questions, which sets me thinking and then reading, which sends me back to listen to the music again. Its a never-ending process which, at best, continually enriches the experience of the music.

But there is no right way. Some of my most vivid musical encounters have been by accident and some of the music that haunts me now is music that a few years ago did nothing for me. There is little to be gained by trying to listen chronologically like the man who tried to read the whole of great literature starting methodically with authors beginning with A, you wont get far. If I have any recommendation it is simply to follow your nose, stop at the places that interest you, but dont be afraid of the unfamiliar. Life often seems too short to listen to music that isnt immediately engaging; on the other hand, its too short not to.

If you browse through the classical section of a major music outlet (on the high street or online) youre likely to find an eclectic collection of music not just famous composers of the concert hall and opera house from the past few hundred years, but a host of lesser known figures and musical styles. For a start, youll find an extensive range of music stretching way back through the Renaissance and medieval period to the simple unaccompanied religious chants of the ninth century or even earlier; next to Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Puccini and Debussy, youll find music by Monteverdi, Palestrina, Machaut and Protin. At the other end of the historical spectrum, the classical music section might include the music of film composers like John Barry or John Williams, songs drawn from pop and jazz idioms but performed by classical singers in orchestral arrangements, and a modernist avant-garde that sounds like it would be unlikely to appeal to the same people as Haydn or Schubert.

There is no simple definition of what constitutes classical music. The term refers to music drawn from over a thousand years of music history, from the medieval to the postmodern. It includes music written specifically for the concert hall but also music that was never intended for an audience. Though the best-known composers of the classical tradition were mostly working in Western Europe, today the story of classical music reaches across the globe. For many people, classical music is simply old music, yet many contemporary composers, writing in modern styles, see themselves as part of a continuing classical tradition. For some, classical music might be simply music for classically trained musicians sung by choirs or played by the kind of acoustic instruments you find in orchestras. But the closer one looks the more elusive becomes any kind of definition. Its not just music written by dead composers because its a living form; it doesnt have any particular set of rules or conventions because composers have continually altered these throughout history; its not just music that takes itself seriously and calls itself art because much of it was neither written nor performed in that way.