Art music
Art music (also known as serious music or legitimate music (often shortened to legit music)), is an umbrella term used to refer to musical traditions implying advanced structural and theoretical considerations and a written musical tradition. The notion of art music is a frequent and well defined musicological distinction, e.g., referred to by musicologist Philip Tagg as one of an "axiomatic triangle consisting of 'folk', 'art' and 'popular' musics." He explains that each of these three is distinguishable from the others according to certain criteria. The main tradition in the Western world is usually called classical music. In this regard, it is frequently used as a contrasting term to popular music and traditional or folk music. The term also covers non-Western classical traditions such as Chinese classical music and Traditional Japanese music.
This term is mostly used to refer to music descending from the tradition of Western classical music. 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, " this 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, asserting the superiority of art music 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 Johann Sebastian Bach, 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, Zoltán Kodály, François-Bernard Mâche, Gustav Mahler, Olivier Messiaen, Maurice Ravel, Steve Reich, and Claude Vivier have drawn influence from regional or extra-European traditional music.