In 1942, WQXR co-founder Elliott Sanger wrote an essay (“Who Likes Good Music?”) in which he argues people of various backgrounds and income groups listen to “good music.” What did he mean by “good” music? Sanger uses the word five times, as opposed to “classical,” which appears only once, to contrast the genre with jazz. In the 1970s Sanger, in his history of the station, Rebel in Radio: The Story of WQXR, writes of the programmers using “this great supply of music to please almost every taste among lovers of good music,” and includes a chapter called “America's No. 1 Fine Music Station.”
Sanger uses the term “good music” like a genre. It made us wonder, when did we switch to mainly referring to what the station plays as “classical”?
To put the term “classical” in context, it helps to look at how it was originally used. Conventionally, some scholars cite 1836 as the year “classical music” was made official. “Classical music [as a term] was largely used as a method to identify the new musical reality of the 19th century as being somehow distinct from what came before in the late 1700s,” says University of Southern California musicologist Nate Sloan. Following Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, there was a perceived new paradigm of music making. “So they borrowed from then-current literary tradition, and it was given the name Romanticism. It was a bit of a revisionary tactic, naming Classical as the era that came before.” It’s safe to say that back then, no one was calling the latest Brahms “classical music.”
If we didn’t always use “classical” to refer to what was written over the course of centuries in Western Europe, what word did people use? “In the 17th century, people will consciously call their collection ‘the new music’ or ‘pieces in a modern style,’ and they’re obviously opposing it to older styles,” said SUNY Stony Brook music history and theory professor Erika Honisch. “But the difference between then and now ... was that the burden of proof was on the new music to show it was worthy, not on the old music to show it was relevant.” There’s the late Middle Ages’ ars nova (new art), coined to discern it from high Middle Ages’ ars antiqua (old art). Bach’s Mass in B Minor has the artistic stylings of stile antico (old style), as opposed to the more "baroque" conventions of the day (though Bach wouldn't have called himself a Baroque composer). And as for the actual Classical era? Honisch prefers the term galant, since the word is more contemporaneous with Mozart’s music.
Unfortunately, you won’t find closure when trying to learn exactly when we started rolling it all together as “classical music.” It was a gradual shift, and different academic and professional spheres use different terms to describe this particular art music tradition — Honisch says the phrase is even fading from some academic circles. “I realized that we think much more about the label ‘Western art music’ than we do about ‘classical music.’ We’ve sort of ditched it at most institutions now … but it’s everywhere outside the University.” It makes sense: In an academic space “classical music” is far too broad, since many cultures, like those belonging to India and China, have their own “classical” traditions.
What about radio? Bob Sherman, longtime broadcaster, current host of WQXR’s “Young Artists Showcase” and resident bolo tie enthusiast, says that the station’s transition to using “classical” was slow and is difficult to pinpoint in time, partially because of the variety of programming, which included jazz and theater in addition to “good music.” He acknowledged that it may sound awkward today, but when WQXR was founded, it was “designed as a station ... for more educated and ‘interesting’ people, higher income, who wanted ‘fine’ programming.”
There’s that inescapable race and class divide, which is also on full display in the recording industry.
Ethnomusicologist Gregory Weinstein researches classical recordings. When I asked him the “When did we start calling it classical?” question, he echoed the sentiments of others, saying there might not be a person or event to pin the moment to. He believes it’s more helpful to think of the roots of the word-as-genre. “There weren’t genre labels at the beginning of the industry; they arrive in the 1920s, when our concept of genre comes to be.” Ads of that time illustrate those divides and use some of those qualifiers: “good,” “fine,” “serious.”
While you might be inclined to think “classical” music was marketed in opposition to the more novel and scandalous jazz, Weinstein argues that (at least in the U.S.) it goes further back than that. “‘Serious music’ or ‘good music’ is what [19th century] Americans used to refer to symphonic and chamber music,” he told me. And like many things in America, race played an inherent factor. “When I taught American music classes, I would always start them with minstrelsy … because I think that racial binary that shows up in relation to minstrelsy becomes the driving force of all American music from then on. It was a popular music / folk music … [put] very much in opposition to ‘serious’ music. The concept of there being these inherently black musical forms was in part to highlight that there were these ‘good, [i.e.] white’ forms. ”
By the 1920s, the necessity of marketing different genres to different demographics had taken hold. Weinstein notes how “white” and “black” music was split into “hillbilly music” and “race records” — categorizing them as such made for more reliable sales. “Classical, I’d say is no different. It’s a way of telling the audience that ‘We see you and are trying to sell something that you like.’ But it is different, because it claims a much larger historical lineage.” Being a part of that “lineage” can imply a certain superiority or correctness, which then might delegitimize, say, jazz or rock or hip-hop’s own musicality.
With recent suggestions that classical music should call itself “orchestral music,” or questions as to whether video game or film music should be placed in the classical tradition, it’s even easier to understand why the “when” of this question is so hard to pin down. Whether we’re speaking in the academy or in a record store or on radio, the conversation continues to evolve.
Maybe we can still call it “good music,” but less as a classical music euphemism, and more in the spirit of Duke Ellington: “There are simply two kinds of music. Good music and the other kind, the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed.”