Misnomers

My inaugural blog post made liberal use of the terms "classical music" and "popular music". I use these terms because I believe they will be commonly understood according to how I intend to use them, and really because I cannot find superior alternatives. Actually I vehemently detest these terms, especially because most of the "classical music" I listen to is hardly classical, and much of the "popular music" I listen to is far from popular (that is, according to the literal definitions of the words).

Of course, to take the term "popular" in this naïve fashion to mean that all works of music in this category are popular is absurd. The label should categorise a piece of music based on its intrinsic characteristics, not by its public regard. However, considering the term "popular" as applying to a genre rather than its individual elements is also problematic, since it assumes the existence of some canonical way of dividing music into categories, then the label "popular music" applying to the most popular of these. Thus, the label gives no clues as to what actually distinguishes between the categories.

The word "classical" has many confusing meanings, but to me the word has connotations of belonging to (or being based on) old traditions from earlier cultures, and it just seems silly to apply this term to music which was written this year. The term reinforces the misconception that "classical music" was all written hundreds of years ago. There have been attempts to popularise new terms to describe this genre such as "art music" or "serious music", but these are insulting when you think about what they imply about non-"classical" music.

The lack of appropriate labels for "classical" and "popular" music stems partially from the difficulty in stating the distinction between these two types of music without giving a history lecture. A first instinct is usually to refer to the instrumentation of the music, but this fails to partition accurately when you consider that today we have all types of orchestral instruments being utilised in "popular" music, and electric guitars and drum kits appearing in "classical" works, and music from both groups being created entirely by computers or electronics.

Another way in which we might characterise the genres is by considering that "classical" music is generally composed so that a work exists as a written out score — it can be performed by any group of people and it is still considered to be the same piece of music. The performers attempt to realise the composer's vision of the music as strictly as possible. Thus we could consider "classical" music to be composer-centric. "Popular" music, on the other hand, is usually very closely tied to the performers. A band will sculpt their own specific version of a song, and if another band creates a "cover" of the song, then it is expected that they will bring something of their own to it and not just try to emulate the original sound. So "popular" music is performer-centric. However, this distinction of composer-centric versus performer-centric music is still not very satisfying, because it is more to do with real-world logistics rather than inherent properties of the music itself.

You may somewhat correctly be thinking that all of this discussion is moot since the terms "classical" and "popular" are now so vague as to be useless, and we can circumvent all this hoohah by sticking to more specific genres; subdividing "classical" into baroque, classical(!), romantic, impressionist, serial, neoclassical, minimalist, electronic, et cetera; and subdividing "popular" into rock, pop(!), folk, country, hip hop, electronic, et cetera. But it is useful (in particular for me, in this blog) to have the more general labels to use, and the fact remains that there does seem to exist a not-very-blurry line dividing "classical" and "popular" music, so why is it so hard to come up with a concise description of the difference between the two?

If you, my reader, have ideas for more suitable labels, I will be glad to hear them. Until then, I will reluctantly drop the quotation marks around "classical" and "popular" for increased readability and reduced cynicism.