Phoenix32890 wrote:Classical music is a term which indicates a style of music that came after the Baroque, and before the Romantic era. Mozart and Haydn were the most famous composers of "classical" music.
You're right to put the quotes around the word "classical," since music historians have still not quite figured out what to do about this problematic term. There are so many disadvantages to using it. For one thing, it's not a term that was ever used by the composers it purports to describe. It was retroactively given to them by German Romantic composers seeking to write (or mythologize) their own musical history: just as ancient Greek culture was seen as the seed the flowered into modern Western civilization, so too was the music of Mozart and Haydn seen as the seed that flowered into the music of the mid-nineteenth century. That is why Mozart and Haydn were given the same descriptor as Greek Antiquity: "Classical." That is also why the word applies more or less exclusively to Germanic composers. (These days you sometimes hear Boccherini described as "Classical," but only because he was a contemporary of Mozart and Haydn. The Romantics who invented the term certainly did not include Boccherini when they were drawing their musical family tree.)
And so there's a bit of controversy about why we hold on to a term whose primary purpose was to validate the careers of composers born a half-century after Mozart and Haydn. It's also not clear why we need a term at all to designate such a small period of time (the "Classical period" is usually thought to run between 1750 and 1800), let alone just three composers (if you throw in Beethoven) out of that small period of time.
But all of these disadvantages just don't trump the one advantage the term has: the fact that everyone has been using it for a century and a half. Scholars have tried switching to the phrase "late 18th-century music," but "the Classical period" is just too convenient.
Thanks for the lead on the Greenberg lectures, by the way. I routinely teach music appreciation and am gearing up to do it again this fall, so I'll check out the lectures to see if they might be useful resources for my students.
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