Long Haired Music For A Popular Culture

Modern culture, some would even call it, post-modern culture, today’s culture of rock and roll, rap, jazz, is best described as culture for the populace, popular culture. This ambiguous yet identifiable culture is the one we are most familiar with and what we oppose to the ‘old’ culture, the culture before Elvis Presley, the Beetles, and B.B. King. With music, in particular, we can easily identify the modern culture over against the culture that produced such music as comes from classical music composers such as Haydn, Handel, Lully, or Purcell. We immediately note that these older composers worked primarily with orchestral expressions, with full symphonies of oboes, bassoons, wood winds of every sort, a variety of brass instruments, even harps, and of course concert pianos. While we occasionally will find modern music employing this range of instruments, most of us consider a lead guitar, a rhythm guitar, a bass and a set of drums all you really need to make beautiful music in our age. While that may be, and while today’s music may move us as did the work of the classical music composers of ages pass, we would be doing ourselves a disservice not to give an ear occasionally to the work of the ‘long hairs’ who once thrilled royalty, the aristocracy, the people of a culture from which our own has sprung.

Yes, classical music composers produced a music that seems at times overly complex and subtle, as if you needed a Masters in musicology to understand it, but that is because our ears have lost the refinement, the careful attentiveness that these classical music composers presupposed of their audience. If we approach classical music with our hearts and minds as well as with our ears, we can easily appreciate the monumental works of a Mozart or a Beethoven. Music addresses the heart first, the emotions, and these are something that are at the very heart of every human soul. Classical music is no different than modern music in its purpose, namely, to move the heart and mind towards an apprehension of beauty in sound.

Modern music composers and classical music composers both aim to stir the mind and the emotions with the same elements of music, with melody, polyphony, harmony, rhythm. The very principles that define the classical genre, those of measure, unity, clarity, balance, proportion, have not been superseded by modern music: the classic principles or art, poetry and music which were elucidated by the ancient Greeks such as Plato or Aristotle, and taken up when these were re-discovered in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries still condition the music of our own day. If you doubt this, just compare some of today’s music with that of the Baroque, the Rocco, the impressionist, with classical music composers such as Debussy or Stravinsky. What you will find is that in both styles, modern and classic, the ideals of careful craftsmanship, idealist control, and formal beauty exist in both.

Give an ear to the long hairs of old. You’ll find that they describe much the same emotions, the same wonder, the same delight in sound that today’s long hairs do with metal and electronic vibrations. The instruments may be somewhat different, the goal, the apprehension of beauty, remains the same.

The author has been writing articles online for 4 years now. Come visit his latest site SlideInCode that discusses SlideInCode review by Sean Clark.