Theoretically Speaking, S4:E10: What Makes Classical, Classical ?

You were expecting K-Pop Part 2, weren’t you?

But after three weeks of City Pop, J-Pop, and K-Pop Part 1, I figured you’d all want a palette cleanser. I sure do.

Sorry. I’m all popped out.

So: classical music, it is.

As I mentioned in the baroque article, there are six distinct periods that fall under the classical umbrella.

And one of them, the period from 1750 to about 1830, is also called “classical.”

Calling it the classical period of classical music is confusing, but this article is about the music created in that 80 year window and how it differs from the baroque period that came before and the romantic period that came after.

In 1665, a pandemic ravaged Europe.

There’s no truth to the legend that Issac Newton got his ideas about gravity when an apple fell on his head. But it is true that he saw an apple fall and wondered why everything falls towards the earth rather than away from it.

And in 1687 he introduced his theory of gravitation in his book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

Newton’s ideas about gravity were widely known by 1722. That’s when Jean Philippe Rameau wrote Traité de l’harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels, which we just call Treatise on Harmony. Rameau says there’s gravity in music. Melodies and chords want to return to their tonal center, like the apple wants to fall to earth. He called this idea “fundamental bass.”

You know this, whether you know you know it or not.

Did you notice I left off the last word? Without it, you’re left hanging. You need that last note to make it feel finished. That last note is the tonic, the note that shares the same letter as the song’s key. If it’s in the key of G, it feels most complete if you end on a G.

There had been books about music before but they were mostly how-to manuals. Rameau approached music as a science and a philosophy, attempting to unveil the “why” of music theory and understand the natural laws governing it. 

At the same time, composers were taking a back-to-basics approach.

Which was kinda punk of them.

Bach and the rest of the baroque cats had shown that you could have four melodies going at the same time and they would work in both vertical and horizontal harmony. 

That’s called polyphony, and it’s a defining characteristic of baroque.

At about the same time that Rameau published Treatise on Harmony, composers started writing simpler pieces. They would write a single melody, one the audience could remember and hum on their way out of the concert, supported by chords as Remeau had outlined.

Imagine all the people leaving the debut of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony going, “Ba na na naaaaah!”

This single, singable, melody line is the first characteristic of the classical period. It’s called homophony, with homo- meaning “one” and -phony meaning “sound.”

However, a melody all by itself isn’t really enough. It needs support and context.

Rameau explained how this works, too. Using reason, which was en vogue during the Enlightenment, he found that the overtones a note produces are the octave, the fifth note of its scale, and then the third.

It’s all math, you see, and we can prove this with an experiment. If you have a guitar or other string instrument, pluck a string while holding it down at its exact midpoint. The note you’ll hear will be one octave higher than the string without your finger.

The various other notes on the instrument’s neck are precise percentages of the string’s entire length.

Look inside a piano and you’ll see its strings are progressively shorter.

Rameau’s scientific approach to what makes things sound good gave us the major and minor keys, as well as the three chords he called the tonic, subdominant, and dominant.

These are the same three chords you’ll find in 12 bar blues songs and a whole lotta rock songs.

I’m not suggesting The Kingsmen read Treatise on Harmony, but those three chords in “Louie Louie?” They’re the tonic, subdominant, and dominant. We’ve been using Rameau’s ideas since 1722, often without knowing it.

This idea that music that sounds good based on natural phenomenon is typical of the Enlightenment.

Studying nature showed it has order and balance and symmetry, so music should, too. If you look at the art and architecture of the time, they also have order and balance and symmetry.

By the way, why isn’t “symmetry” a palindrome?

One technique for outlining the chords under a melody is called “Alberti bass.” It wasn’t invented by composer Domenico Alberti but it’s named after him because he used it so much. Chords are three (or more) notes and while they’re sometimes played simultaneously, they can also be played one at a time.

Music from the classical period tries to replicate nature’s beauty. It’s simple, ordered, and balanced. 

Mind you, simple doesn’t mean it’s easy to create.

Watch an athlete score a goal with what seems to be no effort at all, and you’re looking at years of sweat and practice. The same goes for composing music. It’s easy to complicate a piece, and much harder to add only what needs adding – and nothing less or more.

Baroque music is complicated and dense. Classical is simple and light. What’s more, the mood of a baroque piece stayed the same throughout. Classical works can change moods in each movement, or even within a few measures.

This gave composers the freedom to specify the volumes at which notes or passages should be played, and volume indicators were added to standard notation.

A lowercase “p” indicates “piano” or “soft” in Italian. Two p’s means softer still and ppp means very, very, quiet. The Italian word for “loud” is “forte” so “f” means loud, and you can guess what “ff” and “fff” mean.

The composers had more control over everything. In baroque, “basso continuo” was a bass part the composer outlined but the player improvised the notes. In classical, the composer didn’t just suggest – he wrote out exactly what he wanted.

At more or less the same time, composers moved from being hired hands at churches or royal courts to being contractors available to any patron who ponied up the money.

Rather than a king telling a composer to write a piece by next week, the composer could tell the king, “I’ve got three other commitments in front of you.”

Depending on whether the king owned a guillotine or not, of course.

However, composers didn’t really push the envelope. They gave themselves limitations, preferring to work inside frameworks. Nature has frameworks the Enlightenment was trying to understand, and if it’s good enough for God, it’s good enough for composers.

Pop songs have a verse-chorus-verse-chorus framework. There might be a bridge or pre-chorus, but you’re familiar with the structure. In classical, the sonata form became very popular. 

The sonata has three parts: 

• The exposition, in which the main themes are presented. There are usually two themes, one in the home key and one in a contrasting key. It’s the conflict that’s interesting and dramatic.
• The development, in which the themes are explored and varied even more, and always in several different keys. The composer can really go nuts here and add some imaginative flights of fancy.  It can be chaotic or tense but must resolve to the home key by its end.
• The recapitulation, in which the themes are fully realized and are now in the same key as if the conflict has been resolved, even if it’s a tragic resolution in a minor key. Some sort of growth has taken place.

There may also be an introduction and a coda at the end. Regardless, it’s a great storytelling technique, even without lyrics.

The sonata form can be used for a single piano or a full orchestra or any ensemble. It works well with string quartets, which were a new grouping of instruments in the classical period.

Even though the classical period gave us innovations like the sonata, string quartet, and symphony, composers mostly stayed with the tried and true.

They didn’t really push the envelope, instead working inside their frameworks. This might be why this refined, made-to-order music is the least favorite of current day musicians. They’d rather play something from the romantic period, which followed classical.

There are exceptions, of course. The big three names of the classical period are Hadyn, Mozart, and Beethoven. You know their music and probably a little about their histories so I won’t go into it, but I want to call your attention to the opening few measures of Beethoven’s First Symphony in C major.

The C7 is now considered a blues chord because of its dissonance, and Beethoven uses it a century before the blues appeared in the Mississippi delta. It resolves to an F major and is followed by a series of dissonant chords that throw us off from the tonal center. It’s lusciously confusing.

What’s Beethoven doing here? Many suggest it’s his little joke on the audience.

The Enlightenment promoted reason, science, philosophy, and individual liberty.

These were all threats to the ruling class, and led to revolutions around the world, notably in France and what became the United States. 

Late in the baroque period, there were more public concerts than before and they’ve continued ever since. Making music available to everyone was part and parcel of freedom.

It wasn’t just for the rich and royal anymore. While the music of the classical period may be a little too pristine, it’s based on the advancement of thought, ethics, and science.

And those are good ideas.

Let’s bring them back.

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