Art Music - Definition

Definition

This term is mostly used to refer to music descending from classical tradition. This is the common definition referred by many musicologists and scholars including Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, Theodor Adorno,Deryck Cooke, Joseph Swain, Nicholas Cook, Nicola Dibben, Philip Tagg, or Gregory Booth and Terry Lee Kuhn. Many of these authors, however, tend to be critical or prudent with respect to certain implications of this classification. Those authors most particularly associated with critical musicology movement and popular music studies like Tagg tend to reject latent social elitism that has sometimes been associated with this classification.

Some other authors interested in music theory may define art music differently. Musician Catherine Schmidt-Jones for example defines art music as "a music which requires significantly more work by the listener to fully appreciate than is typical of popular music." In her view, "his can include the more challenging types of jazz and rock music, as well as Classical."

While often used to refer primarily to Western historical classical music, the term may refer to:

• The classical/art music traditions of several different cultures around the world;
• Modern and contemporary classical music, including serialism, electronic art music, experimental (art) music and minimalist music, as well as other forms;
• Some forms of jazz, excluding most forms generally considered to be popular music. Jazz is generally considered as popular music. (Adorno for example refers to jazz as some kind of popular music.) But some more technical forms of jazz have blurred borders between art music and popular music.

While earlier musicological approaches tended to consider art music in an elitist way, stating art musics superiority over other forms of music (for example Adorno), many modern musicologists (most particularly ethnomusicologists) dispute the notion of superiority. In a recent international musicology colloquium dedicated to music and globalization, some ethnomusicologists such as Jean During insisted that no matter the technicity and difficulty of music, every musical tradition has the same dignity and no one can claim any superiority over another.

Furthermore, many art music composers have made reference to popular music including Milton Babbitt, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonard Bernstein, Vincent D’Indy, Guillaume Dufay, George Gershwin, Josquin des Prez, Darius Milhaud, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Manuel M. Ponce, Arnold Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and William Walton, while others like Béla Bartók, Pierre Boulez, Johannes Brahms, John Cage, Claude Debussy, Antonín Dvořák, Lou Harrison, Zoltan Kodaly, François-Bernard Mâche, Gustav Mahler, Olivier Messiaen, Maurice Ravel, Steve Reich, and Claude Vivier have drawn influence from regional or extra-European traditional music.

Moreover, in some cases the distinction between popular and art music has been blurred, particularly in the late 20th century.