Composer's Corner

In the news today: John Cage's 639 year composition, "As Slow as Possible" changed chords today. This composition included an 18 month long rest. There was a note change in 2013. The performance will come to an end in 2640.
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/chord-change-composition-scli-int…

I am referring to processes. I have done my share of transcription. Does anyone specialize in one or the other? Or are we all transcribers/composers? Meaning that we transcribe and compose. Because the processes are not the same.

I think I said elsewhere that the most prolific composers determine what is "good." This work by Cage makes him the most prolific composer to ever have lived. In comparison, Bach wrote a mere 175 hours. This piece is extremely difficult to perform live. Wait until we hear the section of staccato notes!

I'm speaking from my own experience. I began with Musescore by transcribing theory books and my own notebooks. The New Score Wizard is ideal for transcription and probably for composing in the style of previous periods. But I subscribe to 21st Century common practice, and now that I am using Musescore more for composing, I find that the Wizard is an obstacle.

So let's compare notes. What are your processes for composition? Transcription work is a different process. 21st Century practice requires the Wizard to have a modified set up or a "Composer's Mode." That's the way I see it. But I spose you see it differently. So shoot.

Then we need to get composers and professional musicians to crawl out of the woodwork and tell us how they work. Because I don't think that the vast majority of us write scores or write completed scores. We work in bits and pieces. Hip Hop groups will compose a collection of 1000 rhythms just to get a few to work up into an album. I think you are speaking from inside some "classical" bubble. I'm talking real world nuts and bolts over here.

You can test a prototype of what I suggest. Just pick up your handheld recorder and start logging your ideas. Now try that with Musescore. I am speaking from experience. I write and record every day and the Wizard is an obstacle.

Am I going to become a better composer because I filled the titles in on my files rather than using an automated system? Is my music going to be better because I jumped over hurdles to set up a simple grand staff?

On the contrary, I can improve if I am not wasting my time on such things and even more if I am not wasting my time arguing with people about a very logical design improvement.

Jeetee - Who developed this plug in?

Claudio Riffero - No one can say what is classical. Bob Dylan is pure classical if you go back to the Greek tradition of the poet who recites to the harp. In that sense Hip Hop is pure classical because the music is subordinated to the lyrics. After Equal Temperament got it's footing, even before in the Baroque period, music became very elaborate, assumed dominance over the words, and became "classical.'

Cage is certainly a genius, if genius is to have produced a work that is both simple and profound. Yesterday he changed chords and today we are still on that chord. He attempts to ensure that his music will play longer than Bach's - over half a millennium.

I haven't heard Marc's music. I spose it would have to be 21st century because living in the 21st century, we only have 21st century common practice as a resource. Even if you try to produce 16th or 17th century counterpoint, it's not going to be the genuine article. It's going to be 21st century.

What is 21st century common practice? It would seem that we would have to review 20th century common practice to learn this. After our explorations, I think we will arrive at digital technology. The use of music writing software, forum sharing, digital recorders and the DAW are all 21st century common practice. Still, it might be useful to trace all of this back to the 20th, to the first Edison cylinder recorders. We could even trace back to sheet music, Tin Pan Alley and the piano roll. How is music made and distributed? Then, of course, we will have to get into the Bolshevik Revolution and the fall of the world economy. Who knows where this could lead? Wherever it goes, BSG will be out there in front!

I have been contemplating this piece by Cage since the chord changed. I have never heard this piece and never will. No one ever will. If this piece is played twice, Cage's music will still be around more than 1250 years from now, and no one will have actually heard it, except for very tiny bits of it.

The name of the piece is As Slow As Possible, so we can imagine that the chosen tempo for the first play will be superseded by an even slower tempo in the second play. Therefore, it is easily conceivable that Cage's music will be played 2000 years from now without anyone having heard it. That is pure genius. It is not complicated. It is simply simple and yet deeply profound.

Those of you who have an unshakable faith in the written score should be proud. This pushes the written score to it's maximum limits, if there are limits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpZekJDrbvc

Bob - There was a time when I would have made the same judgments on all of modern art.

xavierjazz - Yes, this is a work of art in the same sense that Bach's Cantatas and the Art of the Fugue are works of art. That does not eliminate them as music. ASAP is a work of art and a musical piece, originally written for piano and runs from 20 to 70 minutes because it has no tempo marking, unless the title is a tempo marking. So, since it is written music and is performed on a piano or organ, it is music, and music is art. So it's both. But it's good that you take note of that. You and eye may eventually see i to i.

This piece raises many philosophical and physical questions. Spose this piece is performed 10 times, with a deceleration of tempo each time? Spose they just keep decreasing the tempo 25,000 or 200,000 years from now? Cage says that this piece is akin to 4' 3" in that they are related by silence. That makes sense. If you decrease the tempo until it is "as slow as possible" won't the pitch descend? It would seems to be so since eventually the waves themselves would become distorted by elongation and a longer wave is going to sound at a lower pitch. The work also appears to be designed to disintegrate into silence, like a Picasso sculpture will disintegrate over time from oxidation.

I say it's genius because it is both simple and profound.

Good day! Way back in September (Sep 10, 2020 - 19:24 to be precise) Bobjp wrote:
"It seems to me that if this were genius, then anyone should be able to see it. But I think it a sure thing that had I written this, there would be a big yawn from the world. No one would try to play it. No one would give it a first glance. The Only reason this getting played is because it is Cage.
The same ting would happen if I dumped a few cans of paint on a canvas. No one would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. Even if it looked just like one produced by a famous artist."

This suddenly clicked with me the other day - 8 months later. Why is it that Cage can record random noise, Stockhausen can flip switches and dials to generate weird electronic sounds and it's "classical," yet when John Lennon and Yoko Ono did the same is was "Pop trash?"

Again, I'm listening to the old big bands like Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller. This stuff just sounds classical to me. If you asked me for classical music from the first half of the 20th century, my first recommendations would be Sousa, Joplin, Shaw, Ellington, Goodman, and such name. And my first choices in the latter half of the century would be the same names that you hear on Classic Rock radio. The first thing they call classical music is "classic." I would admit Jazz and Rock, but then I'd stop at Country and wouldn't allow it. I think class has something to do with it. What is it about Cage and Stockhausen that place them in a separate space from someone like Lennon or Ono?

BSG - I'm a generalist. I have not lost sight of the original question. The first question is: What's the difference between classical and pop music? I introduced another auxiliary question: What is common practice? But only with the hope that it might shed light on the primary question.

If changes in technology have nothing to do with common practice, then we can't say that it's classical music if it's written. But I don't think so. What makes "Sumer is acumen in" classical rather than folk? As a folk song it was transmitted orally and aurally, and it even acquired it's counterpoint by singing it as a round. Why is it mentioned in studies of classical music - because it is written? Why isn't Row, Row, Row Your Boat a classical piece? Why isn't Eleanor Rigby sung acapella considered classical?

This would seem to open an avenue for challenging your opinion. Yes, the common of the 16th and 17th centuries is an issue of changes in harmony, but that only makes me think that the change itself is what becomes a focus of common practice. IOW, the change in technologies in those same centuries are not a subject of common practice simply because there were no drastic changes to technology. The most important changes were in harmony. However, in the past century the most revolutionary changes were made in the technology of music production - so it's the change that must affect common practice. And it does, because many of the beatles songs can not be scored correctly. The score is scribed upon the magnetic tape. You have to go to the recording to reproduce the sound.

Another point: Never before in the history of music could the audible harmonic series be accurately transposed. So, technology does affect harmony. How could you notate the continuous micro-chromatic ascent of the theremin or the steel guitar? - with recorded sound.

BSG says (more or less) that common practice refers to the harmonic practice of a given period. Spose we were to take all of the melodies that have ever been composed, regardless of genre, and we sang them acapella. Would we be able to classify them by genre? This woud be a good test to see whether it really is the harmonic element that distinguishes classical from pop.

If I have it right, common practice is the harmonic practice of the day or a period or an era, and is NOT technological improvements in recording, such as improvements to papermaking or printing of staves and pens and inks. This seems to be the argument that has been made previously as to my citing of recording techniques as belonging to common practice. I hold that position because new ink or paper technology does not affect the harmony, but audio recording did and still does continue to alter common practice because it does affect the harmonic practice in this era.

For the first time in history musicians could work directly with sound. They could record a bird singing rather than notate it for a flute or piccolo. They could also the tonic pitch of that bird song and the overtones of the harmonic series along with it and all of the successive pitches after the tonic and their overtones - a truer transposition than any orchestral instrument could achieve. The piano is in the key of A. The note A is the only note on the piano which is commensurate throughout. A1 is 55, A2 100, A3 220, A4 440 etc. No other notes on the piano are commensurate with each other. True transposition is impossible. Audio recording does affect harmonic practice.

Production methods are important to consider. The music of the Baroque was transformed in the Classical period due to better instruments with more power and sustain. I wonder if Bach would accept Ravel as "classical?" He might label that music as being from the "Bombastic Period."

On a lighter note, how can anyone hear this and not recognize it as classical music?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsiKy_H1KUM

Before replying to this latest barrage, I'd like to review the twists and turns of this discussion. I'll be looking at these two threads and outline the topic thus far.
March 20, 2020 https://musescore.org/en/node/302624
March 28, 2020 https://musescore.org/en/node/303036

I'll work my own summary up this month and you'll be able to do the same. We can fill in the gaps together.

To begin, Bob said on March 20th "Historically it's not accurate to say that rock or pop music is the classical music of today." That is the point I am arguing against. Somewhere along the way, I asked who the 2oth century masters of classical music were. I offered Sousa and Joplin. No one else made an offer. No one agreed to nor did they dispute my selection. To help nudge you out of the stupor, I asked what is the common practice of the 20th century? Again, I received no response.

I think we can make progress on answering these questions, which may in turn illuminate the main question. I have furthered my argument by offering analog and digital recording as the common practice of our current period. The counter to that was that production tools do not have a bearing on common practice. Now, I am demonstrating that the recording of music and its transposition constitutes THE (or one of the) peculiar aspect/s which distinguishes this period from all others.

Some of you are following these threads of thought. We now need to talk about the harmonic series and it's transposition. Something that Bach would approve of since this has been a thorny issue since day one. I say that the transposition of the harmonic series could not be affected completely and accurately until the introduction of analog recording. After the analog period and the beginning of the digital, transposition can no longer be accomplished with the same accuracy. So, we first need to look at the harmonic series, the different tunings, and transposition in the analog period.

Some of you might want to review those links and note whether your own questions are being attended to.

Someone made what I thought was a very helpful comment. They said that classical music was music that was written. I liked this idea because it gave us some objective criteria to apply. When I applied this axiom, I found that I could discard both Stockhausen and Cage from the "classics" and include Foster, Joplin and Sousa, along with Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller. The axiom is fine with me and I can accept the outcome. Can you?

It was at that point that I introduced the idea that the notation system had changed from written score to audio recorded score. Then BSG challenged that idea (and that is what we are challenging here - ideas, not people) by countering that production methods don't have anythiong to do with common practice because common practice refers to harmonic practice. So I counter with the fact that the harmonic practice has been altered by the recording process. Now we should follow that line of thought until we can say what common practice is in greater detail and who were the greatest practitioners of the practices.

"So, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the general public worked. But they don't work now? Of course there was popular music at the time. It just wasn't classical."

Bob - I'm not sure that music was referred to as "classical" or "popular" until the 20th century. It may have been a marketing approach by the recording and radio industries.

What music existed before classical? Folk? Which then evolved into "sacred" and "secular?" It might be good to look at the difference between those two divisions.

And we seem to be introducing some equivocations. I was simply playing on the word "mass" although I think I accidentally stumbled onto something more. In 1720, the time of Bach's output, the norm was that healthy and law abiding citizens attended church on a regular (weekly) basis. There is plenty of evidence for this. I can cite historical facts. I wish that you would do the same because you introduced yourself into this topic with the words "Historically speaking..."

Historically, it is true that 20th century classical music and it's composers were rejected by the general population. But we can't read that into previous periods. There is an abundance of historical fact that supports this claim. Even so, there may be an equal amount of facts to outweigh this argument. However, I don't appreciate reviewing all of the facts supporting my positions, when you do not reciprocate with listing historical fact to support your claims. I can produce facts on both sides of the question, but that leaves me doing all of the heavy lifting here.

Anyway, let's not confuse (though it will be difficult to do) "popular" with "popularity." An artist can play popular music and not be popular. An artist can play classical and rise to the top of the Top 100 (witness the case of the Benedictine monks singing Gregorian chant.)

To demonstrate that Mozart was a pop star:
Exibit A: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Exibit B: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

The fact is that during the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods, the audience could carry the music away with them. They could leave a dance still stepping out a waltz while singing the tune. They could hum many of the great melodies of the opera. (BTW, opera houses could not be built faster and big enough in the 19th century. That was for accommodating the immense popularity of the opera and the ballet.) That brings me to Tchaikovsky. He wasn't pumping out the hits? The Nutcracker and Swan Lake ballets were smashes. And the Nutcracker Suite was at the Top o' the Pops, so to speak. Pure pop.

What happened in the 20th century was that the audience could no longer dance to the music, nor sing a melody. I just listened to several Stockhausen albums last week and can't but only vaguely remember a thing that I heard. Not so with the pop music of the same time.

My theory is that all music is pop. After a few decades, we select what is "classic," then we continue selecting out from the classics until a century later we have what we call "classical." To invert that process - the classical music is a selection made over the course of a century from the classic artists and classic works and the classics are selected from the popular music. I think an examination of the music that existed before classical came into being might throw light on this. So, in the beginning, there was folk. Then occurs a division from folk into sacred anbd secular. The secular music must have been rooted in folk. The difference came about when these folk melodies were fixed to a grid (staff) and more strictly formalized. Before this, the pitches, rhythms and tempos were not as stable.

"It is my understanding that sitar has traditionally been taught by rote."

Bob - So, an Indian raga is not classical music because it is taught by rote, but Chopin is classical because it's taught by rote?

NOTE: I misquoted Bob in a previous post when I said that he wrote "Historically speaking." He did not write that. He simply wrote the word "Historically." Same issue though. I would like you to back up your claims with a body of facts.

Another equivocation in this discussion is the uses of the terms "harmonic series" and "equal temperament." I think twice, people conflated those two things. They are not the same. Equal temperament was described correctly, but is not the issue that I was introducing.

Twelve-tone equal temperament[a] is the musical system that divides the octave into 12 parts, all of which are equally tempered (equally spaced) on a logarithmic scale, with a ratio equal to the 12th root of 2 (12√2 ≈ 1.05946). That resulting smallest interval, 1⁄12 the width of an octave, is called a semitone or half step.

I made no mention of EQ, but rather the harmonic series which is expressed as a series of ratios (1/1, 1/2, 2/3, 4/5, 5/6.) That was not transposable until analog recording came to be, and even now has been lost with digital (EQ does not transpose the HS but distorts that series.) I'm talking about THE harmonic series. But to be clear, you could detune all 230 strings used to produce the notes of the 88 keys on a piano, and I could record that mess (230 randomly tuned and untuned strings) and I transpose that sound completely and accurately. I can do that with any sound or random noise.

This is a most important point because I made the claim that "common practice" used to be to write the music down and that has changed with the advent of the wire or tape recorder. Then someone said that "common practice" refers not to how the music is recorded but to the use of the elements of music, such as melody, harmony and rhythm. To which I argue that the recording process allows for more direct and precise manipulation of those elements. The fact that you can transpose the human voice up an 8ve or down an 8ve by doubling or halving the playback speed is an issue of harmonic or common practice in the 20th century. It is probably more important than the introduction of the 12 tone row. When used as I described, the analog recorder becomes a musical instrument in itself.

Can you imagine telling Bach that you could not only record the human voice but a particular personal voice? And that you can transpose the human voice from the bass register to the tenor or visa versa? That you could transpose a female soprano down to an alto or tenor. Try to imagine explaining these things to Bach. Remind me to outline how I would inform the master in terms that he would understand.

So we have to eliminate these equivocations. I admit that I am stretching the word classical in a new direction, but it's OK to do that as long as we account for what meanings are attached to which words. The word "popular" is better understood as "contemporary." The word "classical" as used by myself means a selection of music from the past by succeeding generations. This is something akin to the folk process, where the garbage is trimmed from the repertoire and the cream of the crop rises. But some might think of classical as being a style and the music should sound some way or other.

I still have to reply directly to several people here and will do so when I have time. Marc, you say that the experts disagree with me. Let the experts answer the main question. I don't think that this is a question for specialists, though they can help in correcting or clarifying details. If some one says that the Baroque period ended with the death of Bach in the mid 18th century, an expert might add that he died in 1750, to be precise. The details of my theory are open to correction by the experts (in the sense that they are experts in these details) but no one can make a reasonable counter-argument to the story I want to tell except a generalist. You must provide a body of historical fact and put it together to tell the story of classical and popular music. We are not arguing about details.

Furthermore, Marc, yes, you are correct, no one has to answer my question, but a theory ought to answer hitherto unresolved questions. My presentation intends to do just that - and to answer the main question. No one here has attempted to deal directly with the main question. It requires an entire overview of music history.

Ziya and Imaginatorium . Those are very strong entries into the discussion. Do you have any questions about what you have written?

Did I in any way misrepresent the harmonic series when I listed the progression of simple ratios of 1/2 (or 2/1 if you prefer) 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6...?

What's the difference between the harmonic series and equal temperament?

What's the difference between the harmonic series and the overtone series?

What is the difference between the harmonic series and equal temperament? What's the difference between the harmonic series and a series of tones? I think Bob has suggested the answer - one is natural and the other is artificial. How so?

Let's look at a few of the things that people posted in response to my mention of "the harmonic series."

"Twelve-tone equal temperament[a] is the musical system that divides the octave into 12 parts, all of which are equally tempered (equally spaced) on a logarithmic scale, with a ratio equal to the 12th root of 2 (12√2 ≈ 1.05946). That resulting smallest interval, 1⁄12 the width of an octave, is called a semitone or half step."

OK. This is the formula for prescribing a series of tones (in equal temperament.) It could be that technical programmers refer to this series as "the harmonic series" but this is an artificial series. The harmonic series in the physical world is the series produced when any object emits a tone. That is what we are discussing. We are not discussing a series of tones yet. We can talk about the harmonic series of a single tone and no series of tones is necessary to discuss the harmonic series.

The harmonic series reads thus: 1, 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6... to infinity. This is derived from observations of nature. You might want to read Sensations of Tone by Helmholtz. Any other series is just a series of tones, but the harmonic series is the stuff that tones are made of. I think the problem we have is that we are equivocating when using the term "the harmonic series."

Let's move on to what Bob said when challenged to transpose the harmonic series. He sat at a piano with Bach and Bach played a series of tones, then transposed them to another series of tones. Again, this is not a transposition of the harmonic series. The challenge is to transpose one single tone and to transpose it's elementary constituents, including the timbral aspects.

So, Bob, if I record any sound, I can most accurately and most completely transpose the harmonic series with all it's force and timbre intact with an audio recorder. The only change in the harmonic series is to the pitch, when the speed is varied.

Ziya - You also supplied us with a formula for a series of tones. First, I took your numbers and made sine waves of 100, 200, 300, up to about 800 or 900. These sine waves when combined do not produce a musical tone. They produce a buzz which is something between a noise and a tone. So, you are not referring to the stuff that musical tones are made of.

I also worked out your numbers applied to a fundamental of 440 and they magically produce a very near approximation of equal temperament (off by 3 cents on the third, I believe.) I can only deduce that you are programming with the view to the production of artificial sounds and the people you are associated with are using the term "the harmonic series" for a shortcut to equal temperament. Even so, this shortcut is not ET. The formula for ET was correctly described in a previous post.

But now we are talking composer's talk and the physics of acoustics. I should not be obligated to use the term "the natural harmonic series" but for the fact that you are misusing these words from the POV of physics. Your series is a very close approximation of ET, though, so I value your input. I would prefer that everybody refer to a series of tones as "a series of tones" and that we reserve the term "the harmonic series" for the stuff that tones are composed of - the harmonic series.

Next, Ziya, we can look at the first post that you made. This one did refer to the natural harmonic series to a point. (Bob, you should be able to see in that post what parts of his statement are grounded in physical facts, what part is merely convention, and what part comes from mathematical induction.)

Ziya, you were doing fine until you transposed the F to position it below the fundamental. Why did you do this? If the F sits at the 16th position(?) in the harmonic series, why did you fool with it? This is an example of the difference between the natural harmonic series and an artificial series of tones. And yes I know that the 5th below the fundamental is F. But you were going up, up, up and when you didn't find what you wanted, you just did some slight of hand and pulled up an F from below. This is unjustified. The fourth is actually where you first had it positioned. In that original position you had the harmonic series, As soon as you switched directions the series became artificial. (And yes, I know that every textbook does this.) Why not go up one harmonic and then down one harmonic? Then repeat that process. That would seem fair, except you won't like what you find. So, you will go reaching up to get what you want. The process is inconsistent and reeks of the subjective. Either go up or go down, or go back and forth equally, but don't go up, up, up, up and become dissatisfied with the result and then change direction simply to make the facts conform to a preconceived position. YOU needed that F note for something. Nature did not require it.

The harmonic series is 1, 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, ...
What happens, acoustically, when we invert the series to become 1, 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, 6/5, ...?

SYNOPSIS OF THIS DISCUSSION:
The main question is: What is the difference between classical and popular music? The auxiliary questions concern common practice in the 20th century. I want to show where classical music comes from and where it ended in the 20th. What did composers do with the series of tones in the first half of the 20th and what did they do with the harmonic series in the latter half of the century? I want to demonstrate why I believe that Jazz, Blues and Rock & Roll were the classical music of that time. Schoenberg, Cage and Stockhausen were interesting experimenters, but the compositions came from the world of Pop.

I want to formulate my arguments from objective materials such as series of tones, the harmonic series and it's transposition, recording technology, and also the great losses of music in it's long history. Pop and classical have one thing in common. When I listen to what is on the charts today, I am aghast at the poor quality of music that is produced. We have to imagine also how very poor all of the lost music of the last 5000 years has been. For every Bach there must have been 10,000 other composers, all of their music not worth preserving or simply lost accidentally. There is no reason to believe that what we think of as "classical" was anything but a very large barrage of very idiotic sounding material that suffered a 99.99% extinction rate. This is what classical and pop have in common. The pop music of today is facing that same demise, but when people in the 25th century look back to select the classical music of today, it will be the finest pop music surviving and still in circulation.

For music to become "classical" it must be recorded and it must survive the careful and repeated selection process over many generations. The pop music of today, most of it won't survive, and that's good, but some will, and that's great. Whose music survives and whose is elevated to a place of greatness? The same rules apply here that we see at work in the visual arts, film, literature and poetry. The greats are the most prolific. You are going to be very hard put to find an instance that challenges that observation. The great pop music of the last century came from the most prolific artists. We could even extend this rule to the sciences. Einstein, Darwin, Freud - they were all more prolific than their contemporaries. Someone said that Telemann was more prolific than Bach. Bach has more surviving works. Telemann's work was lost. The work has first got to survive in order for it to be selected. In some cases, it did not survive because it was not selected.

It's that time of year when we all get in a jolly mood for a discussion on What is the Difference between Classical Music and Pop Music. All disputes are resolved about what the harmonic series is. I mistook just intonation for the harmonic series and that accounts for that misagreement.

Now, Bob has asked what is meant by "the transposition of the harmonic series. These are only provisional terms for my hypothesis. We might change that to be "manipulation of the harmonic series" in some instances.

Ziya, you might be best qualified to answer this question. Can the harmonic series be manipulated and transposed? It would appear to be the case in both the Chipmunks song that I posted and in your construction of a single tone from the harmonic series. The first is a transposition and the second is at least a manipulation. Or would you like to call it by another name?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_music#Ideological_origins
"It was in 18th-century England that the term "'classical' first came to stand for a particular canon of works in performance."

Apparently the term was first used to separate older traditions from newer practices and forms. Since the term emerged in the 18th century, it served to divide the contrapuntal era (and previous periods) from the period of Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven (or the newer styles.) This serves as an analogy for our current understanding of pop and classical. We are confronted with the fact that newer forms are somewhat repulsive to us. I spose that Beethoven was too bombastic for those old codgers.

But let's do this. Let's, for the sake of argument, limit our definition to the Classical period (appr. 1750 to 1800.) Then, in that period, who was making popular music?

I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed to the development of this discussion.

Ziya - For correcting my false description of the harmonic series.

Bob and Marc - For that info about using upper case for the periods in classical music.

I want to continue clarifying the language because I plan to present two hypotheses in 2022 and these hypotheses are developing naturally, out of this process of clarification.

Marc Sabatella • Dec 13, 2021 - 16:07
"There is no official definition for what exactly constitutes "classical" any more than there is for what constitutes "pop", or "jazz", or "country"

Marc - I see that you are using lower case for the genres. I'd like to continue with that form. However, though "classical" and "pop" are in lower case, they do not refer to periods or genres. We are probably going to run into further problems defining genre, form and style, because I consider them to be too intertwined to separate. So, what are the genres of the classical periods?

"the horribly-named but also more or less universally-understood Modern period"

You take issue with the term "Modern." Why is that?

Marc Sabatella • Dec 21, 2021 - 17:58In reply to I'd like to thank everyone… by Rockhoven
Who says classical and pop do not refer to genres? Unless you want to invent a new definition of the word "genre", those terms absolutely do refer to genres.

I got this idea from something Marc said in the past few weeks. Something about how classical music was all about genre. That got me to thinking. Marc, I have a comment below for you.

bobjp • Jan 17, 2022 - 18:54In reply to Marc - The question is whats… by Rockhoven
Wait. So if I want to find a Miles Davis recording, I go to the classical section?

Jm6stringer • Jan 17, 2022 - 20:37In reply to Wait. So if I want to find a… by bobjp
bobjp wrote:
Wait. So if I want to find a Miles Davis recording, I go to the classical section?

Indeed, that does sound peculiar...
...and if Miles Davis is classical, then why not relegate J.S. Bach to the jazz section... ;-)

Nice try. No, we are not organizing anything by artist. We are organizing primarily by genre and secondarily by date. So, if Miles did some cool jazz, those pieces or albums go into cool jazz. If he did something called bop or bebop, it goes to bebop. Bach gets distributed to genre, form or style folders. We have aria, recitative, chorale, gigue, toccata etc. In addition the Cantatas get folder along with concept albums. Waltz gets all of the waltzes of Strauss and others, including the Tennessee Waltz and Morning has Broken by Cat Stevens. We are not at all interested in preserving either the catalog of an artist under one label, neither the integrity of larger works. Sonata and sonata-allegro for example. Sonatas belong with concept albums perhaps. But all sonata-allegro movements are extracted and placed in sonata-allegro. Scherzos go into scherzo. Rondo to rondo...

But we need not do this as more than a thought experiment. Once we have the music arranged, we can draw up a table and do some math. The idea here is to view the whole Western repertoire differently. We can list all of the genres in a post from the 16th to 20th centuries. We should notice that in every other period, there are an equal number of genres, styles or forms, with the exception of the 20th century. So, if classical music.

Marc, where are the genres in 20th century classical music? All I can cite is atonal, microtonal, collage and electronic. The genres that Bach was using are all popular forms. I am going to show that Bach played for an incredible number of people, that all were from the general population and that he preferred to use the popular forms of the day because his job was to entertain people in the church service. But, I want to do that under my thorough and historically documented refutation of Bob's hypothesis that classical music was not composed for nor liked by the general population but for only a small part. But the facts are highly relevant to this new issue of where did the genres go in the 20th century?