Time to Get Rid of "Classical" Music

For me, my musical resolution for the start of this year is to get rid of the term "classical music" in my burgeoning iTunes library. I find the term "classical" to be quite ridiculous in many ways. Firstly, if you look at the meaning of the term "classical" in the arts it is usually taken to mean an aesthetic attitude based on the art of ancient Greece and Rome.

Giovanni Paolo Pannini's Capriccio of Classical Ruins (1739) evokes the classical world

The question becomes what it is about the standard concert repertoire that is remotely related to ancient Greece or Rome. The lack of period notation means that no works of Greco-Roman classical music have been written down for posterity.

The Oxford Dictionary gives us another definition of the word "classical":

Of the first rank or authority; constituting a standard or model; especially in literature. 

This is why you find the expression Weimar Classicism used to denote the writing of Goethe and Schiller. In general, however, the expression "classical literature" refers to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome—Homer, for example. In the literary world, the expression "classical" is rarely applied to the works of Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante—assuming we can call these the great triumvirate of "modern" (as opposed to "classical") Western literature. In philosophy the "classical" philosophers are the likes of Plato and Aristotle, whereas Spinoza and Kant are referred to as "modern" philosophers.

The question becomes why on earth we refer to works written by the likes of Stravinsky or Bartók as being "classical music". It seems the absolute heights of absurdity. Nobody would refer to the contemporaries of Stravinsky or Bartók in literature and philosophy as "classical" writers. Worse still, there are contemporary composers who call themselves "composers of classical music". If a contemporary writer of literature claimed to write "classical literature" they would be put away in a lunatic asylum.

Another absurdity is the vast range of music that is lumped under the rubric of "classical music". This includes music spanning around a thousand years, from all over the world, including states that no longer exist, such as the Franco-Flemish and Venetian empires. I listen regularly to composers from Russia, Hungary, Finland, Poland, Estonia, France, Italy, South America, Japan, New Zealand, Korea, China, Australia, and Spain. The musical language can be monophonic, pre-tonal modal diatonic-polyphony, tonal diatonic homophony, or post-tonal dodecaphony. By comparison, the mainstream popular music market consists entirely of a homogenous diatonic homophony from a mostly Anglo-American source (and its imitators) dating from a period only about half a century, which nonetheless subdivides itself into a vast range of supposed "genres".

I find iTunes irritating enough in that it calls the movements in instrumental works "songs" even where there is no singing. You get people saying that they "dig" the first "song" of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Unfortunately, I have gotten into a habit of using iTunes to file a huge library of lossless ALAC files for quick reference and have yet to get into the habit of using one of the many iTunes substitutes. Yet having hundreds of files labelled as "classical music" is completely useless to me. You might as well file them under the genre of "music".

Personally, I don't even like the term "classicism" applied to Haydn or Mozart. Nowhere in their writings did they say they were trying to recreate the aesthetics of the ancient Greco-Roman world in their music. The label is an extremely ill conceived one. So I am labelling them as First Viennese School, to contrast with the Second Viennese School. Oddly enough, I have simply filed Richard Wagner as "Wagner" although Neue Deutsche Schule along with Liszt and Bruckner might have been useful, but I didn't want a whole lot of Liszt and Bruckner to show up at the same time as a search of Wagner. While I doubt that readers will all agree with such labels, it does better organise a large digital library into more logical categories that are useful to me.

So, if only for myself, I am ditching "classical" music. It's a horribly pretentious sounding term anyway.