And then, near the start of the 20th century, came the rise of modernism. Before modernism, new classical music wasn't so different from the old stuff. Of course new styles emerged, to reflect the changing world, and some of them (Wagner's, in particular) proved explosive. But still there were composers like Brahms, who wrote in something recognizable as the old way, and even a radical like Wagner could have moments in his music that were simple and melodic.

Modernism changed all that. I'm not saying that modernist music was bad, or that composers didn't have the deepest, most powerful necessity for writing it. But it sounded harsh; it avoided (or much of it did) steady rhythms and understandable melodies. So now the new music with the highest critical prestige stood apart both from everyday life and from the masterworks of the classical mainstream. Which of course focused classical music even more on the past (an uncomfortable paradox, since modernism saw itself as a leap toward the future).

And then came the final blow, the rise of popular culture, and still worse (worse, that is, for classical music), the rise of popular music -- jazz and rock -- that in many ways wasn't created on western models. Now it was even harder for classical music to reflect contemporary life, since now the world expressed itself in music that wasn't even remotely classical. Brahms, a high-art composer in the 19th century, could be friends with Johann Strauss, whose waltzes were, in their time, popular music of the most unabashed sort. But the two composers could, in many ways, be colleagues, since Brahms wrote popular waltzes, too, when he felt like it, and both men scored their music for the same orchestral instruments (violins, bassoons, flutes and oboes). Compare now John Corigliano and Bob Dylan, a top classical composer and a rock immortal. What do they have in common? At one time, Corigliano -- when he'd written a song cycle based on Dylan lyrics -- said he'd never even heard a Dylan song, and while that raised some eyebrows, it didn't seem outrageous, because the gap between classical music and rock really is that wide. And the result (not of Corigliano never hearing Dylan, but of the gap between classical music and rock and jazz)? Classical music gets even more boxed into its little corner. It can't claim to be contemporary art, since (as I've already said) it doesn't speak the musical language of contemporary life. And to make things worse, it finessed the problem, in effect, by evolving its own closed-in kind of new music (the modernist kind), which doesn't even want any contact with the outside world. Worse yet, jazz and rock evolved their own kinds of art music. So now people who want new musical art don't have to care about classical music at all. We shouldn't be surprised, then, that classical music is losing ground. First it insulates itself from the outside world (in all the ways that I've described), and then the outside world returns the compliment, and gets interested in other things.

Let's now look a little bit at each of these developments, the rise of the idea of classical music, the rise of modernism, and the rise of popular music that's decidedly unclassical. And we can begin with a vignette from musical history, defining a moment when classical music -- as we understand the words today -- had not just come into being, but had very clearly taken charge. "In October [of 1895]," writes Jan Swafford, in his deep, engaging biography of Brahms, "Brahms went to Zürich to conduct [his] Triumphlied for the inauguration of the new Tonhalle [which still is Zurich's leading concert hall today]. Looking up at the paintings on the ceiling, he saw portraits of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and himself."

This isn't an experience that Beethoven, Bach, or Mozart could have had. Bach, coming of age as a musician in the early 18th century, would have had to find a job. Music was embedded in social life, and was written to be used, often as entertainment, or else in church. No one would have compared Bach to musicians of the past, because their music, by and large, wasn't ever played. In Mozart's time, the later 18th century, this was true as well, and even though Mozart (who couldn't hold a job, and who, despite his genius, wasn't a wild success at writing music for the public) had to earn his living by his wits, the only people anybody could compare him to were other composers making their careers in the same time and place. Beethoven (who lived into the 19th century) was even more independent, and in fact was the first composer to be defined more or less by everybody as a free-standing artist, writing music for the ages. But since he was the first to be seen this way -- and since music from the past still wasn't usually performed -- the pantheon of paintings on the ceiling didn't yet exist. It was coming into being (Beethoven could have named his greatest predecessors), but it hadn't taken root in many peoples' minds, and surely hadn't taken form in architecture.

But when Brahms began to study, in the early 1840s, the pantheon existed. "The overwhelming presence," Swafford writes, "of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven...would make the past increasingly present in the musical repertoire." Brahms's teacher Edward Marxsen revered those names, and also Bach, and Schubert (in whom, people thought, at least a little of Beethoven's glow had shone). Marxsen also revered the musical forms that these composers used, musical forms that (as Swafford quotes him) he said were "eternally incorruptible." This, too, could never have happened earlier. Composers studied certain old techniques (like species counterpoint, the art, codified for generations, of writing one melody against another, following highly formal rules), but they never would have worshipped the larger forms their predecessors used. Instead, each new generation evolved forms of its own.

Later, when Brahms encountered Robert Schumann (a composer who embodied, though in his own poetic way, reverence for the pantheon), and both Schumann and his wife (a famous pianist) hailed him as...well, as what rock critics a dozen years ago would have called "the new Dylan," what they meant, of course, and quite explicitly, is that he was the new Beethoven. This didn't only bring encouragement. It brought responsibility; the pantheon was weighty, and composers who aspired to it had to write the kind of weighty music Beethoven had written, which above all meant symphonies. Thus Brahms, who up to then had written largely for the piano, was told he had to write for orchestra. Eventually he did, and wonderfully, but the expectation may have hurt him; it was years before he dared to try a symphony. And when much later in his life, in 1872, he became conductor of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (The Society of Friends of Music), one of Vienna's leading musical performing groups, he mostly played old music, works from that weighty pantheon. That might have been surprising; Brahms was one of the world's leading composers, after all, and clearly had an interest in seeing new music played. But playing music of the past seemed much more urgent, and because of this, the classical music world had much the shape it has today.

In the next episode: classical music vs. popular music, 19th century style. And a look at modernism and at popular culture.

Citations:

William Weber, "Did People Listen in the 18th Century?" Early Music, Vol. 25, No. 4, 25th Anniversary Issue: Listening Practice. (Nov., 1997), pp. 678-691.

Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Brahms sees the painting of himself, p. 602; Edward Marxsen, pp. 25, 52; Brahms and Schumann, pp. 75ff (though much of the writing about the weight of Brahms's musical heritage comes elsewhere, passim); Brahms conducted very little new music, p. 371.

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