And on that note…

What is contemporary classical music, and where is it going?

As a musician, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about exactly what music is and what its purpose is. One conclusion I have come to is that it’s all about intent. Intent is the major difference between the genres; folk music is made to hum to, electronic music to dance, classical to appreciate. Or put even more simply, music is either made with the purpose of being entertainment or art. That being said, the primary function of music for art as opposed to music for entertainment is to elicit some sort of emotion or idea in the listener, or challenge the listeners perceptions of what music can be. In this sense, “art music” is now almost completely ignored by the modern public audience. It still exists, and composers are still tirelessly trying to make a living composing with the intent of making music for art, but no one listens to it anymore. Why?

The problem is that modern art (classical) music has become so completely embedded in its traditions that it has become almost totally incomprehensible to those who are not familiar with the classical tradition. Even the label of “contemporary classical music” carries with it an assumption that this music is aspiring to an ideal that’s well over 300 years old, even though the genre has moved pretty far past Beethoven by now. That’s why I personally reject this label of contemporary classical, and have been using the term art music instead in this column. It’s like if you called the entire body of modern literature “contemporary elizabethan literature”. It makes absolutely no sense!

What all this means for modern composers is that it may take a revolution of sorts to put music back in its place in the artistic food chain. And in fact, this revolution may already have started. A revolution not from the aging classicists who still cling onto Mozart, but in the underground bars of big cities where rock and pop groups are continuously pushing the envelope on what you can and can not do in a rock band setup. A lot of my inspiration for “classical”  music has actually come from some of my favourite rock bands. From a Godspeed You! Black Emperor track, where they’ll often compose to such length and scale that it feels symphonic in its epic proportions, to that one Fleet Foxes song, “The Shrine/An Argument” where there’s this crazy saxophone solo that is so abrasive it could fit right in in some mid-20th century serialist noise music, there’s a lot of neat stuff going on. These examples represent glimmers of a new way of creating classics whose artistic value can span the ages. Now maybe all we need is the rock band Beethoven to come along, and we’ll have a completely new aesthetic for musical art for generations to come.

 

Jakub Marshall is a 2nd year Music Student at Brandon University. He enjoys composing, playing in bands, and his cats.

Published in Volume 68, Number 28 of The Uniter (July 2, 2014)

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