A Postmodern Convergence

NEW DISTINCTIONS IN THE POSTMODERN AGE

The 1960s indeed marked a new era for both art music and popular music, and the next few decades saw a number of revolutions in musical aesthetics take place on both sides. As a result, several of the long-standing barriers separating art music from popular music have withered or fallen in this “postmodern age.”

I. COMPLEXITY
The first of these obsolete distinctions concerns the notorious complexity of art music (particularly high modernist classical music), compared with the often simplistic construction of popular music. However, by the late 1950s this generalization no longer applied exclusively and was under siege from both camps. The experimental music of John Cage and his followers was almost aggressive in its simplicity; indeed, the infamous 4’33” took the concept to its utmost extreme. Meanwhile, as previously mentioned, free jazz as well as increasingly sophisticated musical theater belied the notion that popular music was for simpletons. Moreover, these were not isolated or exceptional movements, though the heydays of free jazz and aleatoric music passed relatively quickly. Album-oriented rock (e.g., later Beatles, Pink Floyd) and electronica (e.g., Aphex Twin) soon arrived to take up the mantle of complexity in popular music, while the minimalism of Terry Riley and Steve Reich continued the progression towards a more basic art music.

II. ACOUSTIC VS. ELECTRIC
The second distinction reflects the general tendency of art music to employ conventional acoustic instrumentation, while popular music increasingly embraced electric instruments and studio technology after the 1950s. However, there has never been a time when this has been a hard-and-fast rule, and exceptions have abounded on both sides (e.g., Stockhausen’s Kontakte; folk music) since “electronic music” became a reality. A more useful distinction has to do with the use of specific instruments customarily associated with one tradition or the other, such as the electric guitar with jazz and rock, and bowed string instruments with classical music. Here again, however, these identifiers were greatly confounded by the mid-1980s. Steve Reich and Philip Glass wrote a number of pieces for their ensembles that included electric synthesizers (an instrument common to rock bands), and several composers including Alfred Schnittke and William Bolcom have written pieces for orchestra augmented by electric guitar and/or bass. On the other side of the fence, popular vocalists such as Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald had been recording with orchestras for years, but even rock bands like the Beatles were soon using string quartets and orchestral arrangements in the songs “Yesterday,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “A Day in the Life,” among many others.

III. LENGTH
Length of pieces/songs represents the third dimension along which popular music and art music have traditionally remained separate. For a long time, popular songs were restricted by both aesthetic convention and practical necessity to a “radio-friendly” length of between two and five minutes. When a song lasted longer than this, it was usually because of a large number of verses (necessitating many repetitions of the same music). In contrast, classical composers (especially of the late Romantic period and early 20th century) tended to put a premium on monumentality, and gargantuan works for large orchestra became quite common. It was not at all unusual to see a single movement last upwards of 15 minutes. Also, wholesale repeated sections in classical music became less and less common after the 18th century. Art music has always been able to accommodate an extremely wide range of piece lengths, however, as the tiny compositions of Anton Webern can attest. For popular music, the 1960s once again brought a sea change in this aspect of musical construction. The notion of the “concept album” opened the possibility for a record to be considered as a cohesive unit comprising many parts, rather than a random collection of discreet songs. Under this model, the individual tracks became more akin to the movements of a classical piece, with artists oftentimes forgoing the usual pause between tracks to create a more organic listening experience. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) is widely considered the first concept album, although Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973) would be a more characteristic example. At the same time, individual tracks themselves gradually extended in length, from the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (at over seven minutes) to Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (over 17 minutes), culminating in 1972 with Jethro Tull’s album-length concept piece “Thick as a Brick.” Jazz was following a similar trajectory during this time, with a few of Miles Davis’s efforts of the late 1960s approaching 30 minutes (e.g., “Bitches Brew”). These extended works, often taking the form of suites, sometimes took the extra step of incorporating programmatic and extra-musical themes into a largely instrumental context, mimicking a classical device that dated from Baroque times. In this way another distinction between art music and popular music was thwarted.

IV. VIRTUOSITY
The fourth and final characteristic dividing popular and art musics until relatively recently was instrumental virtuosity. Classical music has long relied on the ever-growing talents of its performers to showcase its best qualities, while popular music has its roots in mass participation and easy memorization (to facilitate the oral tradition). With the spread of recording technology, however, it was no longer necessary for a given popular song to be easy to learn by the musical layman, since the song could be perpetuated by other means. Thus, instrumental virtuosi began cropping up across the popular music landscape, most notably in jazz. By the 1960s, rock guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page were constantly raising the bar for performance, and the art-rock bands of the early 1970s (Yes, King Crimson, etc.) featured virtuoso performers at every instrument. Heavy metal was actually nicknamed “the bastard child of classical music” because of its preoccupation with instrumental prowess. Meanwhile, the simpler art music being written by John Cage and his followers often relaxed the need for experienced performers (since they were not required to do very much, in some cases). It should be noted, however, that this phenomenon did not subsequently find its way into the mainstream of postmodern art music (minimalism, though simple in compositional technique and not as demanding of the listener, still tends to call for extraordinary discipline on the part of the performer). As a result, today’s art music still generally calls for a higher level of performer training than popular music, or even pre-20th century classical music for that matter.

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