Adventures in Typology

Typology is basically the practice of dividing things up into different groups: things that are blue vs things that are not blue, Baroque vs Classical, harmony vs counterpoint, French vs Russian composers and so on. Just how you divide things up and which things you choose to lump together and which you choose to distinguish are issues with a lot of consequence. I'm not going to get into the weightier social consequences, instead I am going to do some creative typology, just for fun.

Let me postulate that there are two kinds of composers that we may distinguish as "composers who specialize" vs "composers who roam widely." This is not a typology that I have seen anywhere so let's see what we come up with. First of all, more detailed definitions. By "composers who specialize" I mean composers, like Chopin or Scarlatti or Bruckner, who almost exclusively wrote for a single instrument or in a single genre. Chopin wrote almost exclusively for the piano, Domenico Scarlatti wrote five hundred and fifty-five sonatas for harpsichord and almost nothing else, Rossini wrote almost exclusively operas and Anton Bruckner's output is largely symphonies with lesser amounts of church music and vocal music. But it is the symphonies that we listen to.

"Composers who roam widely" are ones who wrote for all or most of the important genres of their time, if not all. In this category we find a lot of big names: Mozart wrote everything from dance music and serenades to piano sonatas, to masses, to symphonies, to concertos, to opera and he was superlative at every one of them. J. S. Bach wrote for every genre of his time with the exception of opera and dominated some genres so thoroughly, such as the cantata and fugue, that he singlehandedly caused these to survive into our time. Beethoven wrote commandingly for every genre of his time with the exception of vocal music and opera. He wrote one opera and one song cycle and neither of them is on the same level as his symphonies, concertos and piano sonatas. One especially powerful example of a composer who roamed widely is Arnold Schoenberg. He not only wrote for most current genres, he also wrote for an astonishingly wide range of instrumental forces, from the immense late-romantic Gurre-Lieder, to the eccentric chamber group of Pierrot Lunaire, to the miniature piano pieces of op. 19, to the piano and violin concertos, to the opera Moses und Aron--it is hard to thing of a composer who explored such a wide range of possibility.

Now what does this typology tell us? These differences are probably due to factors coming from two directions: composers respond to demand, so if there is huge demand for solo piano or harpsichord music or opera, the composer will seek to fulfill it. But the individual aptitudes of the composer are equally important: if he or she has little attraction to opera or the symphony, they will likely not produce much repertoire in those areas. We should also consider that the needs of the patron, whether it be nobility, the church or a government body, is also very influential. One final factor is aesthetic: where do the demands of the aesthetic challenges of the time lead the composer?

Is this a useful typology? I don't know, what do the commentators think?