Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Maps
- 1 Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam
- 2 Java
- 3 Japan
- 4 China: The Guqin Zither
- 5 Chinese Opera
- 6 North India
- 7 South India
- 8 Mande Jaliyaa
- 9 North American Jazz
- 10 Europe
- 11 North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean: Andalusian Music
- 12 The Eastern Arab World
- 13 Turkey
- 14 Iran
- 15 Uzbekistan and Tajikistan
- Notes
- Bibliographies
- Index
10 - Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Maps
- 1 Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam
- 2 Java
- 3 Japan
- 4 China: The Guqin Zither
- 5 Chinese Opera
- 6 North India
- 7 South India
- 8 Mande Jaliyaa
- 9 North American Jazz
- 10 Europe
- 11 North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean: Andalusian Music
- 12 The Eastern Arab World
- 13 Turkey
- 14 Iran
- 15 Uzbekistan and Tajikistan
- Notes
- Bibliographies
- Index
Summary
We are in one of those large buildings peculiar to the Western classical tradition known as concert halls. Around us are 1,500 or so people, and on stage is an army of musicians, around thirty of whom are playing a miscellany of instruments – woodwind, bowed strings, gleaming brass. With them is a choir of about the same number, four solo singers and – facing all these – the conductor. The music begins in a severely martial tone, the serious rat-a-tat of the kettledrum answered by a similar rhythm in the trumpets. The large body of strings play angry minor chords on strong beats, creating an atmosphere of implacable judgement and terror. Eventually the choir bursts in with the word ‘Kyrie’. This tells us that we are listening to a musical setting of that part of the Roman Catholic Mass which remains unchanged from day to day, the Ordinary. This one is by Joseph Haydn, from 1798, and is called the Nelson Mass.
ON one level this scenario offers something straightforwardly comprehensible. The music rouses emotions in a way that seems familiar for anyone with even a minimal acquaintance with tonal harmony, that unique invention of the West. We feel with ease the stern darkness of the prevailing key of D minor, the martial sound of drums and trumpets, and the joy created by the eventual move to the major key, as if these things were the voice of nature.
On the other hand there are things about the experience that do not seem natural at all. Some of these are institutional and social, such as the way audience feels obliged to sit in stillness and silence, even when moved. The performers’ nineteenth-century formal dress is equally striking. And the music, despite its familiar tonal grammar, is in many ways remote. The neatly balanced articulated phrases and the clean-edged sound-world with no Romantic or impressionistic haze – all this lends the music a period flavour. The music is rooted in a very specific style, the ‘Classical’, which flourished in Europe from around 1770 to around 1810.
This last fact raises a problem. The Classical style reflects a mere halfcentury in a tradition that has so far lasted more than a millennium. Within that millennium are innumerable other styles. Which of them is typical of classical music in the broader sense of the word? None.
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- The Other Classical MusicsFifteen Great Traditions, pp. 216 - 245Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015
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