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I am a music composition major at the University of Alabama, studying under Dr. Marvin Johnson (a former student of Milton Babbit) and Dr. Craig First (former student of Pulitzer prize winner Shulamit Ran, ect) and studying theory under Dr. Stephen Peles.

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Newgrounds Audio Junkies (and everyone else who cares): What do you believe is "classical" music?

Posted by smartpoetic Mar. 27, 2009 @ 5:40 PM EDT

Let's take an extremely opinionated and biased poll, shall we? ;)

According to the definition in the Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music, it states that "classical music" is "...in popular usage, art or 'serious' music as opposed to popular music (183)."

Many believe that classical music is any music that happens to have some sort of violin instrument or orchestra playing. However, contrary to popular belief, "Hey There Delilah" (with it's crappy violin accompaniment) is NOT classical music.

***WARNING: RANDOM MUSIC HISTORY LESSON***

I believe that classical music is determined by it's style and time period. The classical style really didn't start developing until opera (comic opera, in fact) made its scene in Italy in the in the late 17th to 18th centuries. Classical music usually follows very strict counterpoint rules. Any rules ever violated in music of that time period could not go unbroken without reason.

***END RANDOM MUSIC HISTORY LESSON***

That means that what many composers are submitting today on Newgrounds (and elsewhere) isn't necessarily "classical" but "neo-classical" music. Since we as composers (or DJs or songwriters or beat-makers or whatever the hell you call yourself) did not obviously live in that time period...then we are not writing music FROM that time period, but INSPIRED by that time period.

And with that, I give you Beethoven, the piano-playing cat:

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The People Have Spoken

5 Comments

May. 9, 2009 | 12:11 PM Dude09 says:

I completely agree with you. The classical style was greatly influenced by Bach and ended with Beethoven introducing Romantic music. People generallizing music like this makes styles such as Romantic, Impressionistic, early 20th Century, and the Russian movement seem to lose their appeal. It's like generalizing Metallica as rock, you can't because they are clearly metal, the sae goes with the composers of the Common Practice era of music. Kudos to you for making that clarification public. I consider myself quite impressionistic but i know quite well that I'm classified as neo-romantic. I'm definately glad someone had the idea to make the statement u did, and I'm glad your the one to do it.

May. 12, 2009 | 8:52 AM Cosmos8942 says:

http://danman87.newgrounds.com <-does that answer part of your question x.x.

I won't answer the whole thing, it'd make meh sound stupid.

Btw, I just so happened to stumble across you and I must say that I am liking what I hear...gonna putz around and see what I find :3.

-AJ-

Jun. 3, 2009 | 4:35 PM kibas-cool says:

Personally, i believe classical music is music that was made to, on a music sheet, be written exactly the way it sounds. music that isn't classical usually has something like (just a bad example) how latin rock can have an eighth note, followed by a quarter note, followed by another eight note, and gets played as if it was a quarter not followed by an eighth note followed by a quarter note. The main reason classical was before the 1900s is that the Jazz music, getting much more popular, had certain effects that made it written differently from how it was played, and influenced most music afterwards, however some songs are still written classically even today, they just usually aren't as mainstream as they used to be.
-thats a nice cat ^_^

Jun. 4, 2009 | 5:23 AM A1desertstorm says:

Classical music should be anything that came way beyond the time of other genres such as Rock, Hip Hop, Pop, so on and so forth. I guess I would consider it the "Founding" music? The music that sparked all creativity to expand on what was just very complex composing styles.

Dec. 20, 2009 | 9:51 AM Afterhumanity says:

Simply put: "Music that has been either popular or just made after 20+ years."

Not much else to say about that. heh