(07-16-2010, 05:33 AM)--Pete Wrote: I think it was partially true. Consider J.S. Bach. He wrote a lot of music for church, published it, and sold the sheet music.
But to whom? If you wanted to play something by Bach during his lifetime, you pretty much needed a chamber ensemble, an organ, or a harpsichord (or similar). Those things were far beyond the reach of 90%+ of the population. If you could afford them, it was because you were either from a high class, or upper middle class aspiring to join them. A almost-certainly-illiterate peasant, labourer, or servant would have no use for Bach's sheet music, except perhaps to sell it.
Quote:That comes about as close as you can to the modern music distribution system without Internet, radio, TV, CD/DVD, tape, or records.
I would say that "popular" is a question of consumption, not production or distribution. Just because I could buy the collected works of Karlheintz Stockhausen on CD, doesn't make it "popular". (Indeed, some of it might be called downright "unpopular," but that might be uncharitable to some of the 20th century's less well understood composers.)
Quote:Other composers wrote masses and other services. While written for the church or civil aristocracy, they were performed publicly, for all.
This is true. But surely, music for religious or court ritual is almost definitionally excluded from the meaning of popular music?
Quote:While your point about folk music is true, I suspect that more common people were familiar with 'high brow' music than you allow for.
Maybe. I can't really say. By Verdi's day, no doubt they were whistling the tunes in the street. But Verdi's day was a long time after Mozart's - the 50 years from 1800 to 1850 is a huge gap, when it comes to the development of modern popular culture. Mozart was certainly not confined only to a small elite, but did it really go all the way down the social ladder to the "popular" classes?
Quote:I'm often amused at people's attitude towards classical music. Basically, it is just music that has stood the test of time. To clump it together is laughable. The difference between a Bach sonata and a Strauss waltz are as great as those between jazz and country.
"Classical" works fine if what you're describing is a certain style of (generally Austrian) European music from about 1750 until about 1830. Beyond that, it's a silly label for music stores.
Indeed, given the time gap, I'd say Jazz and Country are much closer than J.S. Bach and Johann Strauss II. The latter was not even born until the former had been dead for 75 years, which is almost the entire classical period.
-Jester