People, we’re not really serious about adopting this “alt-classical” terminology, are we? I thought it was a joke, like “hobocore.” But no, it seems that there’s effort afoot to push it, un-ironically, into the classical lexicon.

I’ve always assumed that it was an all-consuming focus on the aesthetic glories of the music that explained the fact that, when it comes to actually figuring out what to call those glories, classical music has usually blown it. We’ve spent a good three centuries now borrowing whatever contemporaneous artistic or philosophical school colors happen to be handy. What exactly is baroque about Baroque music? The Classical period, at least, got it right, with its concern for rhetorical universals and Apollonian clarity—after which “classical” somehow came to be an increasingly non-sequiter-ish term for a host of genres that often flat-out contradicted each other. The Romantics retroactively characterized Romantic music as an intellectual power grab; once the music caught up, it went its own way, necessetating the “late-Romantic” tag. And then, in the 20th century, the discovery of the neo- and post- prefixes led to all manner of ill-fitting appellations.

But even when classical music gets it right, people insist on ruining it. I’ve always liked categorization by compositional technique: reasonably modest, I thought, reasonably clear, reasonably resistant to untoward assumptions about philosophical intent. Atonal, for instance—Schoenberg didn’t like the term much, but as an indication of a piece of music’s technical, key-center-avoiding construction, fairly uncontroversial, right? Wrong. These days, “atonal,” it seems, just means dissonant. A couple weeks ago, doing my homework for the Boston Opera Collaborative’s production of Robert Ward’s The Crucible, I came across this tantrum:

a third-rate musical score that once again demonstrates beyond cavil the unwillingness of some twentieth century composers to write music for the public, because they consider music with any form or melody passé and below their status… what we end up with for two hours is an unpleasant brush with atonalism

Robert Ward, atonalist? News to me—and probably news to Robert Ward. Harmonically speaking, The Crucible is Tosca with jazz chords and stacked-up fourths. I like a well-thrown critical fit as much as the next person, but hurl all the strained peas you want, chromatic is not—or at least should not be, in the opinion of this windmill-tilter—the same thing as atonal.

I’ll leave aside the term “alt-classical” itself—it certainly carries a whiff of attempted with-it overreach to me, but I am hardly an arbiter of cool. It’s supposed to be a catch-all for composers who combine relatively recent (classical-musically speaking) new-music techniques—usually Steve-Reich-influenced ostinato-ish things—with sounds and instrumentation borrowed from indie rock. (Or not—somebody like Mason Bates gets put into the alt-classical category because he does electronica as well. Daft-classical?) But look closer, and the term already starts to do what such terms always do, which is to homogenize and smooth over what makes individual musics so compelling in the first place. Nico Muhly, alt-classical composer? Eh. Nico Muhly, who draws on both art-pop and the Anglican choral tradition to create lush, weirdly ritualistic confections? Now I’m curious. But that’s what this kind of classical terminology always does—restricts the playing field just as the game is getting interesting. (That whole “Second Viennese School” category did nothing but create the impression that three of the most disparately individual composers of the last century—Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg—were all doing the same thing.) And how long before some axe-grinder starts using any new term as a club against their own pet agenda? I’ll say ten minutes.

Genre terminology is so ingrained in music history that it’s hard to get around it, but I would think that’s good enough reason to avoid adding to the glossary. I already hesitate and qualify when using terms even as venerable as Classical and Romantic—do we really need another vague categorization to tiptoe around? I’d much rather try and find taxonomies that communicate some sense of music’s simultaneous variety.

Email