According to conventional wisdom, classical music is understood only by trained musicians, and patronized only by snooty rich people who don't know what's going on but who regard the concert hall as a cultural country club.
Regular folks, it's said, just can't figure out classical music because it's too deep. The classics are not for timid souls.
Well, it's true that classical music can be complicated, and a lot of classical pieces are long. You can hear 10 rock songs in the time it takes to listen to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.
But compare classical music with the movies. A good thriller has an extremely complicated plot, with unexpected twists and plenty of red herring. And on the subject of length, the fact that "Dances with Wolves" took more time to watch than five reruns of "Comer Pyle, U.S.M.C." didn't hurt its popularity.
Yet many people who are willing to burn a great deal of brainpower while watching a complex (or at least long) movie flee in terror from symphonies and operas. You don't need a degree from Juilliard to enjoy classical music. Just thinkof a symphony as an onion.
An onion makes its first, strong impact when you peel its outer layer of skin. You can stop there, teary-eyed, having had a definite Onion Experience. Or you can continue on, peeling one layer after another from the bulb, seeking its heart.
Classical music, too, can make a strong impression on you even if you don't understand the techniques behind it. Beethoven'sSymphony No. 9 has brought tears to the eyes of people who don't know the first thing about harmony and can't tell an oboe from a clarinet.
But the more you know about how classical music is puttogether, and the greater familiarity you develop with a particular composer's background and artistic environment, the more layers of the musical onion you peelaway.Thatleadsyou into a deeper and deeper appreciation of sometking that at first you can only describe as "pretty" - or "too long."
This book, drawn from articles published in The Arizona Daily Star in 1991 and 1992, can help you peel away those first few layers. It isn't a textbook, it isn't a glossary of terms, and it certainly isn't a comprehensive examination of all the most important and popular composers in Europe and the United States during the past 500 years. But it's a start.
Each chapter covers a single composer, and usually focuses on the specific kind of classical music at which that person excelled. So in the Haydn chapter, you'll read about how a string quartet is put together. Then, turning to the Beethoven blurb, you can find out just what "sonata form" means. In the Stravinsky section, you'll get a quick and dirty look at a style called Neoclassicism. And to trace the development of the concerto, you need merely read the chapter on Vivaldi and then that on Mozart.
Of course, you also need to be listening to these composers' music. Each chapter ends with a brief list of recommended compact discs. If you're reluctant to sink money into music you don't know or just can't afford a lot of CDs, you still have several options.
Borrow discs from the Tucson-Pima Library. Buy cheap used LPs from local record and used book stores. Listen to KUAT-FM, and jot down the titles and composers of things that intrigue you. Call the station right away if you can't get the information straight; the announcers are usually happy to spell things out for you.
And from time to time, scrape up a few bucks and go to a concert. You don't need a stunning wardrobe; men regularly get into concert halls without neckties, and women often show up in clothes that are nice but far from formal.
Sure, you'll find members of high society at these concerts (and they aren't necessarily as superficial as "conventional wisdom" maintains). But you'll also find students, middle-classhomemakers and all sorts of other folks. The biggest Vivaldi fan in town is a blue-collar worker who never finished high school and has no classical music training. Yet this guy's favorite music was written 300 years ago by a man in a powdered wig.
But back to this book. Before you launch into the composer chapters, you could probably use a little historical perspective.
For convenience, scholars have divided the history of classical music into several periods. This doesn't mean that music has evolved or improved over the years, but it has changed - the possibilities keep expanding.
Harmonies that seemed unpleasant in 1400 were all the rage in 1850, and those seem tame compared with what's going on today.
Instruments were refined over the centuries; they became smoother sounding and more powerful, although a few became extinct.
Similarly, over the years music has become simultaneously more personal and more public. Composers gradually became more concerned with putting an individual stamp on their works, but at the same time they were reaching wider audiences - customers at the box office, not just a few members of the nobility who organized private music parties.
All these changes have been gradual. In 1750, nobody said, "All right, guys, let's stop writing in that old Baroque style and start something new." But, as a matter of convenience, the stylistic periods have been assigned beginning and ending dates. The predominant style was changing rapidly around those dates, although nothing happened overnight.
One more point before a rundown of those periods. The separation of "classical" or "art" music from "popular" music is a fairly recent development. Well into the 16th century, probably even later, the only meaningful distinction was between sacred music - that used for religious services - and secular music - what people sang and danced to in their spare time.
Only as some music started becoming more abstract did there emerge a distinction of high music from low, art music from folk. Art music came to be associated with the nobility and upper class, the people who kept musicians and composers around as a sign of their prestige and enlightenment.
By the early 19th century, the patronage system was in decline - as was the European aristocracy. Composers started getting jobs wherever they were to be had, instead of toiling exclusively for one prince or bishop. Orchestras retained some ties to municipal or regional governments, but became increasingly independent. Opera houses went commercial, like today's Broadway theaters.
Classical music drew more and more middle-class audiences. The bourgeois businessmen and their families, wanting to affect an upper-class style, went to concerts and actually understood most of what went on because it was fashionable to develop some musical skills of their own, if only the ability to play simple Pieces on the parlor piano.
With the advent of radio and recordings in our century, and an abundance of new leisure activities occupying our time, amateur, do-it-yourself musicianship has become less common. At the same time, composers have been exploring new sounds and techniques that are difficult to appreciate without any preparation.
So we've reached the point at which no more than 10 percent of the American people listens regularly to classical music. And most of that listening time is devoted to composers who have been dead for at least a hundred years.
Maybe you are about to help change all that; perusing these pages could be your first step.
Before you set off, you might like to have at least a rough map of the historical terrain. Bear in mind that all we're covering here is the work of Western European composers and the Americans they influenced. Other cultures all over the world have rich musical histories of their own, and in many places - India and Japan, for instance - those cultures, too, have made distinctions between their own classical and popular styles.
In Europe, not much music from before the Middle Ages has survived in written form. So we trace classical music back only to about the year 800, when the Christian Church was developing plainchant. That was a haunting, hypnotic (some would say monotonous) form of sacred music for voices without instrumental accompaniment, probably rooted in Jewish synagogue traditions. The most famous branch of plainchant was Gregorian chant.
Between about 800 and 1450, there developed a lot of music's basics. The first glimmerings of polyphony (explained in the Palestrina chapter) began around 850.
The staff, that system of (now) five horizontal lines on which notes are drawn, came into use around the year 1000. Composers of religious music experimented with new forms throughout this period.
A division of Medieval music, the Gothic period, began around 1150 with the rise of secular music. This started in southern France with the troubadours, solo poet-musicians who sang in the local language instead of church Latin. They were sort of artful folk singers. Soon these troubadours were being imitated in northern France by guys who called themselves trouveres, and by Germans going by the name of minnesingers.
By 1450, the Renaissance was under way. That's where "The Timid Soul's Guide" begins, with the period's finest composer of sacred music, Palestrina.
Sacred music reached its pinnacle during this time, while in secular music non-vocal pieces were becoming popular for the first time. So the Renaissance is a period of opposites - rowdy instrumental dances and moving, ethereal sacred choral music that by the end of the period had achieved unprecedented pomp and splendor.
By 1600, composers were striking out in many new directions. The Baroque age had arrived, and with it came the first operas and oratorios, the development of such instrumental forms as the suite, sonata and concerto, and an emphasis on intelligent improvisation from performers, within limits set by the composers.
Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Handel and Bach fall into this period.
Bach's death in 1750 arbitrarily marks the end of the Baroque period, and a transition into the brief but brilliant Classical era. Strictly speaking, only the music produced during the last half of the 18th century is in the "classical" style; that's why some people prefer to call what came before and after "art" music, to avoid confusion. This is when the sonata, quartet and symphony came into being at the hands of Haydn, Mozart and an army of lesser colleagues.
By the very first years of the 19th century, music was becoming even more emotive than before, and composers like Beethoven were vastly expanding the Classical forms of symphony and sonata. The whole century has come to be known as the Romantic period.
This was a time of self-conscious innovation,including Wagner's work in opera, and intense self-expression, as in the works of Tchaikovsky, and nationalism, as in the joyously Czech-sounding music of Dvorák. When orchestras and radio stations ask their supporters to name their favorite pieces, most of the items on the classical hit parade turn out to be Romantic works.
With the 20th century, we encounter stylistic chaos. So much has happened during the past 100 years that sorting it all out is hard enough; it's impossible to guess what might happen next. Basically, it's been a time of outright revolt.
Composers distressed by the excesses of Romanticism developed other styles - misty Impressionism in the case of Debussy and Ravel, spiky 18th-century-inspired Neoclassicism in the case of Stravinsky, and a complete abandonment of traditional tonality in the Expressionism and Serialism that derived from the works of Schoenberg.
An especially nasty period came in the 1950s and '60s, when the rift between composers and listeners became wide and the insults exchanged between the groups were increasingly vicious. The leading composers were getting about as far out as possible.
Aleatory music left much to chance, or required musicians, not the composers, to decide which movements or even which notes of a piece were to be played at any given time. Musique concrete exploited the capabilities of tape recorders to manipulate sounds not necessarily made by instruments; because the sounds were artificially organized, composers said, they counted as music. And the use of synthesizers was accomplishing the same thing, to the consternation of conservative listeners.
Recently there's been a strong audience backlash against all these interesting but hardly pretty developments. On the whole, composers in the last decade of this century are paying more attention to the traditional forms, and are getting back to harmony without necessarily giving up the dissonance that reflects our violent age so dramatically. One style that's gotten a lot of attention recently is the ultrarepetitive but tonal Minlmalism, of which John Adams is the most adept proponent.
So now you can plunge into the composer chapters - unless you're totally inexperienced with classical music and therefore especially timid. In that case, you might want to check the next couple of pages for pointers on just what you should listen for when you open your ears to music that's new to you.