The complete idiot's guide to classical music (3 page)

Soon, every monarch worth his royal salt had a couple of court composers to produce music for weddings, funerals, private parties, and all manner of other functions. Some of them were pretty good musicians themselves—Frederick the Great played the flute and Louis IX danced in courtly ballets—and the great body of what we call classical music derived from these aristocratic arbiters of culture.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
When he wasn’t beheading wives, Henry VIII kept a court band of 79 musicians on hand for his royal entertainment. Meanwhile, his daughter, Queen Elizabeth, started the whole idea of dinner music. They say she couldn’t enjoy her supper unless she was being serenaded by an orchestra of trumpets, fifes, and kettledrums.

Things have changed a lot since Handel wrote music for King George to go barging down the Thames. These days, classical music is for everybody. We can hear it on radio and television, go to concerts, or just create our own surround-sound environment at home. Most large cities have free summer concerts with orchestras playing under the stars—a far cry from those bygone days when a concertgoer needed the keys to the castle—and every form of music, from solo recitals to the grandest of operas, is as close as your friendly neighborhood record shop.

Classical music is the creation of a composer, who determines the organization of tones and sounds. You’ll not find improvisational riffs by the sax player as you will in a jazz band and the soprano singing
Lucia
better not interpolate scat-singing à la Ella Fitzgerald. Interpretations, of course, may vary greatly: Listen to the same symphony conducted by Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein and you may wonder whether they were working from the same manuscript. They were, of course: it’s just that the variables of speed, loudness, and instrumental emphasis keep classical music ever fresh and exhilarating.

Okay, it’s not all complex. There is nothing simpler than the unharmonized melody of a Gregorian chant. But when we move on to motets and madrigals, with their interweaving melodic lines, when we consider symphonies, concertos, and that mighty mishmosh known as opera, we realize how complicated a musical structure can get. This doesn’t make it less enjoyable, mind you, it’s just that it becomes a little harder to tell the players apart without a program.

Classical music can be instrumental, vocal, or a combination of the two. In this list, you can discover the wealth of musical arrangements available in each.

I know you never would have guessed this, but an instrumental piece is written for instruments only. It can be for a single guitar or a 110-piece orchestra, but you have to check your vocal cords at the door, since there’s nary a singer in sight.

 

• Solo
  means one. One cello. One trumpet. One kazoo. Just to be difficult, though, a solo can sometimes mean two when a featured instrument has a less important partner, such as a piano accompanying a virtuoso solo on the violin.
  
 

• Duet
  means two equal partners, either at the same instrument, like two guitars, or contrasting ones, such as flute and bassoon.
  
 

• Chamber music
  is for two or more equally important instruments, although here again, there sometimes can be an accompanying part as well. The term began as a description of the location in which this music was played—usually a small room as opposed to a large hall—but now it’s used to designate any sort of small ensemble.
  
 

• Paired instrumental pieces are often called
  sonatas
  ;
  trios
  (three players),
  quartets
  (four players),
  quintets
  (five players), and so on; each adds one more musician to the performing pot. A string quartet, as its name suggests, is for four strings (normally two violins, a viola and a cello); a wind quintet brings together flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn; but a piano trio or quartet doesn’t mean multiple keyboards—it’s just an indication that the piano shares the spotlight with the strings or winds.
  
 

• Once you get beyond an
  octet
  (eight musicians), players usually need a traffic cop to keep things running smoothly (a conductor); anything up to 35 or so instrumentalists is usually called a
  chamber orchestra
  , since it could conceivably fit into your chamber (especially if you live at Versailles).
  
 

• With a
  symphony orchestra
  we’re into the big time, with 60, 70, sometimes well over 100 players on stage at the same time. There are four main instrumental families in the orchestra, all of whose members make sounds in more or less the same ways.
  

Strings include violins, violas, cellos, double basses and, if you insist, the harp. The player either moves a bow across the strings, or plucks them with his fingers. Brasses are those loud, shiny things in the back: trumpets, horns, trombones, tubas. Woodwinds are so called because they were originally made of wood and you blew through them. Now, wind instruments have all sorts of metal parts and some, like the flute and piccolo, are made entirely of metal. The percussion section is the noisiest bunch of all, including anything that’s fit to be banged, bonged, or beaten. It’s sometimes called “the kitchen” because it has everything but the sink.

 
Music Word
A
concerto
is an extended work for one or more solo instruments and orchestra, usually in three movements. Sometimes composers use this title for solo or purely orchestral pieces, when the intended effect is to mimic the scope and focus of a genuine concerto.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
It was German violinist, composer, and conductor Ludwig Spohr (1784–1859) who popularized the small baton we know today, since he liked to carry it around in his pocket. Before that, conductors used everything from a violin bow (Gluck) to a cane with ivory knobs on either end (Spontini).

Vocal music is any progression of musical sounds emanating from the human throat. In a way, it is the most elemental form of music making, since it proceeds from performer to listener without any intervening contraptions.

 

• Songs—Lieder
  During the Middle Ages, troubadours went from castle to castle singing songs of love, valor, and despair, and sometimes involved the local gossip, spilling the beans about which royal personage was doing what to whom. In France they were called chansons. A madrigal was a song in five or six parts; pretty much a poem set to music. In Germany, songs are called lieder. Lieder were especially popular during the Romantic era, and you can follow them to the heights of emotion with works by composers like Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms.
  
 

• Sacred or church music
  Gregorian chants were meant to echo through the high arches of a cathedral and fill the listener with the presence of God. They were monophonic and a capella; that is, they had a single voice and were unaccompanied. By the 11th century, composers began to develop polyphony for two voices. The motet was an early example, typically a song based on Latin text and performed as part of the church service. The Mass, the rite of consecration, evolved during the Renaissance, and has since become an integral part of the classical realm. Composers from Mozart to Leonard Bernstein have composed Masses, some of which are not quite as solemn as they were once intended to be.
  
 

• Chorus
  Choral music is an arrangement of voices. There are women’s choruses and men’s choruses, but many choruses are mixed, to incorporate the full range of voices, from soprano to bass.
  
 

• Opera
  When a dramatic story unfolds in vocal music and you add an orchestral underpinning, you wind up with an opera (or if it’s a Biblical story set to music, an oratorio). Operas can be funny (
  The Daughter of the Regiment
  ) or tragic (
  Aida
  ), short (
  Salome
  ) or endless (
  Gotterdammerung
  ), fanciful (
  The Magic Flute
  ) or realistic (
  Tosca
  ), uplifting (
  Amahl and the Night Visitors
  ) or upsetting (
  Wozzeck
  ). They can also be thrilling and enormously satisfying (all of the above).
  

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
The French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully used to conduct his operas by banging out the rhythm on the floor with a large walking stick. One day he banged out the rhythm on his foot by mistake, and died of blood poisoning shortly afterward.

Listening to classical music takes us out of our workaday world, with all of its stresses and strains. New York City’s Lincoln Center once had a banner proclaiming “Savage Beasts Soothed Here,” and while it may seem contradictory to think of being soothed by the dissonant harmonies of Bartok or the boisterous cries of the Valkyries, it really isn’t. We instinctively turn to music when we feel troubled, angry, or upset, and this is not a recent phenomenon.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Early in the 16th century, Martin Luther told us that “Nothing on earth is so well-suited to make the sad merry, to give courage to the despairing, to make the proud humble, to lessen envy and hate, as music.”