Tag Archives: Classical Antiquity

Classics

Classics – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week I'm discussing what the word "classical" means to me in musical as well as historical and political terms. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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During my high school years in Kansas City, I would often listen to either NPR or 1660 AM, the local classical music station, on my 30 minute drive south to St. James Academy. In those years I continued to embrace Classical Music, especially opera, as an art form that remains a particular passion of mine, even to the point of several ill-fated attempts at composing.

Still, it strikes me that our term classical has a rather complicated set of meanings and uses. In the musical sense, it’s used to refer to the most highbrow of our genres, the rare musical tradition that still sees performances of music composed within the last 400 years rather than the decade-based music that usually makes the Pop and Rock charts. Classical Music tends to embrace the trappings of old European and American elite while also providing a gateway for the rest of us to enter that refined space and hear the radiant melodies and harmonies that have been the soundtrack for generations.

I began to explore Classical Music in my middle school years, like many Americans my introduction to this wide scope of music was through jazz and Gershwin’s blending of the classical and jazz orchestras. I’ve been wanting to write a blog post all about my appreciation for Gershwin’s music, though my continuing uncertainty regarding copyright law has kept me from ever publishing it or trying to record a podcast version of it. From Gershwin I jumped backwards to Mozart, Beethoven, and the other big names before settling both in the Baroque world with Lully and in the realm of the Romantics with the likes of Johann Strauss II, Verdi, Wagner, and Mahler. Today, I still love the music from all of those composers, yet I’m also drawn to more recent works written by the likes of Debussy, film music that fits in the 20th Century late Romantic tradition embodied by Prokofiev and the German film composer Gottfried Huppertz, who longtime Wednesday Blog readers and listeners will remember is the composer of the score for Fritz Lang’s 1926 science fiction film Metropolis. 

In the last couple of years, I’ve returned to my first unwitting introduction to classical music through the film music of the likes of John Williams and Elmer Bernstein and found myself drawn to electronic-classical compositions of Vangelis, which inspired the theme for the Wednesday Blog, and the choral classical-crossover albums of Christopher Tin and 2022’s The Moons Symphony written by Amanda Lee Falkenberg. I’ll gladly spend an afternoon listening to Jerry Goldsmith’s themes for the various Star Trek series and Mr. Williams’s compositions for Star Wars as much as I’ll choose to hear a Mozart piano concerto or Bernard Lallement’s Missa Gallica.

I’ve long thought that classical music saw its greatest innovation in the last century when its venue diversified from the concert hall alone to include the sweeping compositions that breathe life into films. Film music to me fits in the long tradition of ballet music. This comes out of the great silent film tradition of a century ago which reached its zenith in the late 1920s with epics like the original Ben-Hur and Phantom of the Opera films as well as with Metropolis and the other great German expressionist films. Sound film took some of the storytelling need off of the music as now the characters on screen could too be heard, yet the power of music in film was already clear. I relish the chance to hear the Kansas City Symphony perform a concert of film music, because even when it’s disassociated from the pictures that score was originally created to accompany that score often holds up on its own as a concert piece.

It is interesting then to consider that within the world of Classical Music the term “classical” generally only refers to a short span of musical composition within the long history of the wider “classical” genre. The Classical Period in music matches up with the Neo-Classical Period in art, architecture, and literature that ran from around 1750 to 1820. This period includes great composers like Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, all of whom worked in Vienna the beating heart of Europe’s music industry in this period. Yet by this definition the word classical implies a separation from the present, clear limits to its scale and span, and an air of antiquity.

In many other contexts the term classical refers to the far older Classical Antiquity of European History, the centuries during the height of Greek and later Roman civilization from around the 8th century BCE to the 5th century CE. When I write about the classics in my work, I am most often referring to people and ideas conceived during this 13-century long span of time. The classical fathers of Western philosophy––Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle––continue to be required reading in modern philosophy studies, while Aristotle and Pliny the Elder have a foundational role in my own discipline in the History of Natural History. Those two, Aristotle and Pliny, were central influences for the naturalists who defined the Americas in the sixteenth century, people like the focus of my dissertation André Thevet, as well as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and José de Acosta who both wrote natural histories of the Spanish Americas, and Conrad Gessner & Carolus Clusius whose works were written about distant worlds from the comfort of their own homes back in Europe.

Classical is a tricky word because it can be interpreted as something which is removed from common life. It stands apart from popular things because of its high status. I’m often struck by the adoption of mannerisms and norms from the classical music world in popular music, there was one concert I attended nearly a decade ago where the musicians on stage went from dancing in circles playing their violins to suddenly, briskly, taking chairs and sitting in a neat orchestral row in them as though playing the part yet ever with a wink and a nod about it. There has been a general loosening of expectations and normalities in our culture, a sort of reaction to the manners of past generations. I tend to see our present moment as responding to the norms of the 1980s and 1990s, politically we are in a period of unstable transition from the Reagan Conservativism and Clinton centrism of the 80s and 90s, though that needle continues to move forward in time and it does feel now that American conservativism and liberalism now seems to be working in response to the policies of the Bush and Obama Administrations as our youngest generation of voters now were born after the Millennium. I’m happy to see more classical musicians on social media releasing short videos of their performances, rehearsals, and daily practice for all to see. That’s one way for the classical to remain vibrant in the present moment. Still, it worries me that today in 2023 classical and jazz tend to be the exception in popular performance compared to pop, rock, and country.

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The Constancy of the Modern

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If we can learn anything from history, it is that our story has always been acted out and subsequently recorded by people, not unlike us. Each successive generation has done their part to immortalise their greatest tales through stories, both oral and written, into the collective memory of society. As time has passed, each generation of historians has endeavoured to best tell these stories of their predecessors in a way which their own generation can well understand. To the historians of the Renaissance, the millennium immediately proceeding their own time quickly gained the pejorative name the Dark Ages, while its architecture was equally appallingly disparaged as Gothic.

To the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment historians, the time to hearken back to with all glory was that of Classical Antiquity, of Greece and Rome. The intervening millennium in between the Fall of Rome in 476 CE and the rebirth of classical learning in the Italian city-states in the late fifteenth century was merely a setback in the onward march of human progress. It was a setback defined by religious fervour and superstition, when science was equated to wizardry and the light of literacy confined to only a select class of clerics and aristocrats.

Each generation of historians has strived to understand the past both in the light of their own times and in the understanding of how those in the past understood themselves. Yet for the analytical nature of the study of history in our present scientifically-centred age to be properly propped up, contemporary historians must continue to classify and divide history into particular periods, places, and categories. Political history must remain distinct from cultural history and social history, while the aforementioned Renaissance must somehow be understood as different from the Medieval period that came before it.

What is most striking is the division of the discipline into broad spans of time, particularly concerning European history. One has a choice of diving deep into the past with Ancient history, a concentration primarily focused upon the Mediterranean world from the earliest communities to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. Or perhaps one would prefer to study Medieval History, focusing on Europe during the ten centuries between the aforementioned fall of the Western Roman Empire and the eventual fall of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453.

Or, if that does not suit one’s fancy, one could try one’s hand at Early Modern History, covering the period of time between the turn of the sixteenth century to the French Revolution. While modern, this period still has its fair share of the medieval about it to make it more remote. Then there are the modernists, those whose focus is squarely on recent European history, the stuff that has happened since the fall of the Ancien Régime in 1792 and the rise of modern European liberal democracy through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What this model of understanding European history is founded on is the old Renaissance understanding that Europe will always be dominated by the legacy of Rome; therefore all European history must be understood in relation to the glories of the Roman Empire. The medieval is a giant leap backwards in the ruins of the once great imperial edifice, while the rise of modernity marks the return of European society to its former Roman glory. The other thing that this model is focused on is we modern man. Since it was first devised in the seventeenth century, this understanding of history has always held modernity as the pinnacle of human achievement, at least to that point.

The term modern itself comes from the Late Latin modernus, an adjectival modification of the Classical Latin adverb modo, meaning “just now.” Modernus in turn developed into the Middle French moderne by the fourteenth century, indicating that something similar to our understanding of the present time as modern was in use as early as what we would now call the Late Middle Ages. True, to my generation devices like the digital tablet, electric car, or the ability to make videocalls are decidedly modern, our grandparents could equally have said the same fifty years ago for the television, jet airplane, and IBM 7080 computer were equally modern to their own time. Likewise for our great-grandparents the very idea of a subway, car, or airplane on its own was incredibly modern.

The way I see it, the term modern is the hour hand on the clock of time; it is the pointer that marks where we are on the cycle that is human history. Just as Edward III was a modern monarch for his own time so too Elizabeth II is for ours. Likewise, while Geoffrey Chaucer may well have been seen as a modern writer for his day and age, working into the late hours of the night in his rooms within the edifice of London’s Aldgate, so too someone like me is all too modern for my own time. Though I write so often about the past, and do my best to draw connections between what has been and what is present, I cannot help but understand the people, places, and things that have already come and gone through the lens of my own times, of my modernity.

Therefore to define ourselves as modern is not to make us anymore unique than our predecessors. Rather, to do so we not only continue on the legacies of their respective modernities, and write our own story, always utilising this most constant of chronological labels.