“Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord,
That David played, and it pleased the Lord.
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
— from Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen.
Music has long taken a central role in the public expression of culture. Music is a product of culture, like ritual (religious and agricultural), in art, food, ceremonies (marriage, birth, death), and war.
Just as historical religions reflect the particular geography and environment of the given culture (gods of deserts, mountains, ocean, etc.), so too music can represent the psychological and physical circumstances of a culture in its instruments, choirs, singers, and in the rhythms and tones of vocalizations, the compositions and tones. Ultimately, music can represent an instrument of culture representing what is taken to be particular social and economic norms.
The philosopher Plato maintained that the music of the era has the important function of supporting the ethos of the state. Thus, in Republic, Book IV, Plato argues that the vigilant ruler will retain the original forms of music, and that new songs or compositions conform not only in lyric but in form, what he calls “rhythm.”
Centuries later, St. Augustine notes, in his essay De musica the dualism that the Christian era music proposes, the connection between music that bolsters the institution and its narrative (lyrics adhering to strict theology) versus music that addresses the individual emotionally and pychologically, especially through what Augustine himself calls “lovely chants.” Where Plato would advocate a music that sustained the state, Augustine effectively (or inadvertently) notes that Christian era permits both official music but also and emotional genres, based on “rhythm,” as forms of communication with God.
Through the Middle Ages in the West, religious music came to reflect forms that centered on doctrine and liturgy, paralleled by subjective forms in chant and other song. This was the equivalent official music of Plato. Of course, popular and folk music thrived among peasants, laborers, and non-elites. Skeptical clerical views spread quickly in the late Middle Ages, discretely amused by the provocative songs and themes of minstrels and troubadours. The overlap of Plato and Augustine reached a high point in the central medieval period. The split between official ecclesiastic and moderated popular is seen in 12th-century bishop John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, where he denounces minstrels as demons. Their songs do not support the institution nor the morals of the lay person.
With the modern music of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, the disputing duality of purpose accelerates. Music primarily served to bolster the institutional, social, and personal elite classes of ecclesiastics and aristocrats. The composers are tempered by their patrons, the equivalent of Plato’s music monitors. Thus the music of the era is not viable without the assent of the patrons, who in turn supports the state, culture, and morals of the era.
J. S. Bach composed for churchmen, dukes, a prince, and a king. Handel served his patron King George III of England, who was also patron to Purcell. Telemann, close friend of Bach, served both church and secular patrons by composing in both forms (as did Bach). Monteverdi, composer of madrigals, was employed by several Italian cities. The unfortunate Vivaldi did not receive regular commissions due to his eccentricities, and sustained himself by teaching music to pupils of orphanages. Haydn enjoyed lifetime commission to the wealthy Esterházy family. With Mozart the transition to the classical era begins. Mozart outnumbers all the composers dependent on patrons, enjoying the patronage of Holy Roman Emperor to prince, to countess, to archbishop, to wealthy amateurs.
The patronage of classical music largely remained the expression of elite class and cultural education without conscious attention to classical composers are prerequisite to social polish. In that sense, the composers of this era, culminating in Mozart, designate the music of Plato’s dictum. But the Baroque style was broken by both new composition and new social and economic phenomena.
With the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century, its ideas and impulses spreading throughout Europe, the signal cultural dominance of aristocracy began to wane. The influence of emotion, sentiment, and morals rises. The first composer of the era to represent these changes is Beethoven, whose compositions throw themselves into expressible themes provoking listeners to new openness. Beethoven chronicles the passions of society and the souls of its modern protagonists. Ironically, Beethoven enters music as a work of honor, having suffered trauma at the hands of his abusive father, who beat him as a child, with blows to the head, leading to the young Ludwig’s deafness at a young age, but provoking an irrevocable desire to excel in musical composition. From Beethoven we have symphonies portraying politics, nature, and the celestial, and in the sonatas deep philosophizing.
Most importantly here, perhaps, is the fact that Beethoven suffered only three patrons, a count, a baron, and a prince, each with his own eccentricity, his music remained as free and emotive regardless of his patrons’ pretenses. Beethoven’s patrons were music enthusiasts but not composers, performers, or aesthetes, one described by a contemporary (enemy?) as “a cynical degenerate and a shameless coward.”
With Beethoven and going forward, the Romantic era is full of brilliant sentiment. Sentiment is dominant and no obvious attempt by aristocrats arises to bolster institutions in the Platonic sense. The composers simplify. Franz Schubert, for example, held few published works, very little patronage, and no public life. Chopin eventually withdrew from public performance, his sustenance coming from sale of compositions and in teaching piano. The work of the Romantics, even when grandiose as in Rossini, Berlioz, or Wagner, quickly gathered emotional elements, excluding rationality as present truth. Drama and myth, not logical presentation, dissolved the classical sense of stability and control. Patronage relationships continued to diminish. Wagner prospered only under one patron, the King Ludwig of Bavaria. The extremely popular Rossini — wealthy from commissions from the French government — retired from music at an early age when the commission was suddenly dropped. Rossini had combined Plato and Augustine, in effect serving the remnant aristocracy of Europe as well as its growing bourgeoisie. Tchaikovsky had one patron, whom he never met: business woman Nadezhda Von Meck, whose funding over thirteen years granted Tchaikovsky years of full-time composition. But by this time, we may say that the era of traditional music intended to entertain the elite of society, had dissipated.
What is today called “classical music” (as in “classical music radio station”) refers to centuries of music and even contemporary music crafted to echo the music of the centuries. But how many listeners realize that that they are listening to music entirely intended to amuse and entertain the economic and social elite of another era? Or does such listening srve to perpetuate this attitude of elitism? We can wonder if we lived as contemporaries with those composers what our music listening would have been? Or what it should be today?