In my last post I talked about a ubiquitous ternary form, the minuet and trio, found usually as the third movement of string quartets and symphonies. I used this genre to introduce the idea of a contrasting section, which is usually called a "contrasting middle". This is one of the most fundamental structural ideas in music: present an idea, present a contrasting idea and then return to the first idea. There are some details that are important: the first idea or section has to have closure, usually a cadence. The second idea is often in a new key or new tempo or contrasts in other ways such as texture and melody with the first idea. Theorists distinguish between the small ternary and the large ternary, but for our purposes I don't think we need to worry too much about that. See William E. Caplin's Classical Form, p. 211 et seq. for a detailed discussion.
The ternary form with the contrasting middle is an easy form to hear the structure of and it became hugely popular during the 19th century. Mind you, it was also frequently used for slow movements during the Classical era. I want to pick out a couple of examples from the 19th century. Here is the Impromptu op. 90 no. 4 in A flat by Schubert played by Alfred Brendel:
That sparkling opening arpeggio is very distinctive which means that when we hear it return we become very aware of the ABA form. Here is how it looks:
This goes on until the 2:11 mark in the clip. The first section has been ended with a full cadence in A flat major, the home key. Then there are two measures of A flat with an added minor seventh. This is the enharmonic equivalent of G# major seventh which is the dominant of C# minor. Thus with the addition of one single note, that G flat (F# in the new key) Schubert modulates from A flat major to C# minor. Here is how the new section begins:
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This section contrasts with the first section in several ways. There is the key change, which is also a change of mode (from major to minor), but there is also a change in texture. The first section featured brilliant arpeggios in the upper register alternating with chords. Here we have a more typical melody on top with repeated chord accompaniment. The register is much lower and the melody has long notes instead of short ones. About the only thing that is common to the two sections is the meter of 3/4.
At the 4:52 mark in the clip, Schubert begins to transition back to the first section. He does this in two ways. First he prepares the change in key by moving to the dominant of the dominant in C# minor. This is D# major with a seventh. If we respell this as E flat major with a seventh, it is the dominant of the original key, A flat major. Again, a beautifully efficient modulation. While sitting on this chord he changes the key signature and the texture, returning to the high, sparkling arpeggios of the opening. This slips seamlessly into a repeat of the whole opening section. Finis. Here is how that transition looks:
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Now go have another listen to the performance, noticing the transitions between sections and how the mood changes.
In terms of what we might call the mood-schema of these pieces, typically the outer sections are more brilliant and energetic while the inner section takes us inward into a more reflective mood. This was why the form was particularly popular in the 19th century as this was the kind of effect composers were looking for.
I want to put up another example, from the end of the century. This is the Asturias (Leyenda) by Isaac Albéniz that is more often heard on guitar than piano these days. It offers a particularly stark contrast of tempo, texture and mood in the middle section. As it is so easy to hear, I won't put up musical examples. This performance is by John Williams on guitar:
The longer a piece of music becomes, the more the structural challenges for both the composer and listener. It is different from the composer's perspective, of course, because he or she will tend to see it in terms of the materials used. I recall Steve Reich mentioning that such-and-such materials will result in a piece fifteen to twenty minutes long. This is because he uses certain kinds of processes with his materials that take that long to play out. Other factors that might extend the length of a piece are the use of text or the need for different instruments to re-state or develop the thematic material. But perhaps the most common way of writing a medium-length piece is by the use of contrasting sections.
When we talk about different sections in a piece of music we often make use of simple designations like "A" and "B". For example, if a piece begins with one idea and presents it in several phrases ending with a cadence or some sort of cadence equivalent, then we would label this whole section "A". Then if the piece goes on to present new and contrasting material in another independent section, we would label that "B". A very common kind of musical form then presents the A again so the form of the whole piece would be labeled ABA. There are thousands of medium-length pieces in ABA form which is also called "ternary" form.
One of the most common kinds of ternary forms is the minuet and trio, which is often used as the third movement in a host of string quartets and symphonies. Here is the third movement from Haydn's String Quartet op. 20, no. 4:
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Let's have a listen to the movement. This is the Attacca Quartet:
The whole thing is only two minutes long, so why am I using it as an example of "medium length" pieces? The answer is that this is a really convenient way to introduce the idea of ternary form and it is easy to hear in this example. Most minuets and trios, in exactly this form, are longer. I am thinking of shorter pieces as being up to around four or five minutes and medium length ones as being from around five minutes to perhaps ten or twelve minutes in length.
Go listen to the movement again and this time try and follow it in the score. The first thing to note is the repeat marks. In the second set of staves you will see that the second measure is incomplete and has a big double bar with two dots on each staff. This indicates that you go back and repeat the whole section, in this case, from the pickup note in the first violin. The second time you go on to the second section, which is also repeated. Incidentally this whole first section, with two halves, each repeated, is the basic binary dance form we find in a gazillion Baroque dance pieces. Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632 - 1687) is credited with adding a contrasting section (called a "trio" because it was commonly scored for two oboes and a bassoon). The first section is then followed by the trio which is also in two sections, each repeated as you can see from the double bar and the two dots. Each of these two sections is AABB, but the whole is labeled ABA or ternary form. It is extremely easy to hear in this example because the trio is distinguished by being a solo for the cello. As soon as you hear the cello come forward, you are in the trio section. The letters at the end, M. D. C. mean "minuet da capo" or "play the minuet from the beginning."
I think I will save other examples for the next post.
Time to continue this series in which I offer some ways of approaching listening to classical music. There are two previous posts that take a general view, but now I want to focus on some specific repertoire. One of the benefits of studying music is developing the ability to focus closely on something. This is also key to listening. Way back in 2012 I did a couple of posts on what I called "musical exercises" that were a bit similar to what I want to do now. You might have a look.
But this time around, I am going to take a more repertory-based approach. There are dozens of ways you can organize a project like this and perhaps I will try a variety of them. Let's start with an overall look at what different kinds of pieces there are:
short, lyrical or melodic pieces with few or no listening challenges
short pieces with interesting contrapuntal or harmonic aspects
medium length pieces with contrasting sections
medium length pieces with various kinds of complexities for the listener
long pieces with clear structural sections and easily identifiable themes
long pieces with ambiguous structure that pose challenges to the listener
pieces of any length that are difficult to approach
I just invented all these categories so we will have to see how they play out--I may want to add or subtract some. They are roughly in order of difficulty for the listener. The first category is what makes up virtually all of the "Classical Music Top Forty" and hence the repertoire found on all those best-selling classical albums claiming to help you relax. Actually, I'm sure that they do. I posted on that here.
Let's have a couple of examples. Typically, these pieces have a very charming melody and mellifluous harmonies such as in this piece the so-called "Air on a G String" by Bach:
What makes this very effective is that the melody, which you normally expect to be moving around, holds a single note while the accompaniment moves through a descending series of harmonies.
Sometimes there is not a lot of melody and the harmony itself is soothing as in the famous Canon by Pachelbel:
But most often it is the melody, which must be both clear and distinctive, that captures our attention as it soothes and relaxes us:
Second group: short pieces, but with some aspect, usually contrapuntal or harmonic, that presents a bit more challenge to the listener. There are a lot of examples from Bach. A large collection he wrote, partly for the education of his children (three of whom were the leading composers of the next generation) is titled the "Well-Tempered Clavier" meaning the well-tuned keyboard. Most of the pieces are fairly short and they come in two kinds: preludes, which are very tightly written pieces based usually on a single idea and fugues, which I will get to in a minute. Here is the D minor prelude from Book I:
As you can hear, it is a very simple texture. The right hand plays a constant stream of triplets, often descending, while the left hand provides a harmonic foundation. As is the case with most of the preludes, this is a structure where the harmony is the main element. There is no easily hummable melody, but lots of neat harmonic sequences. A sequence, in harmony, is a progression where short segments are repeated on different pitch levels. It is actually a lot easier to hear than describe. You can hear a very clear one from the 5 second to the 10 second mark in this clip. This is a brief descending fifths sequence.
The fugue that goes with this same prelude gives us another excellent example. This, while also very short, around 2 minutes, uses a different texture entirely. Instead of the two voices, one in running triplets and the other in plodding eighths, this piece is in three distinct and equal voices. A fugue is a texture in which each voice states a "subject" or distinctive melodic theme. Then all the voices go on to develop it in various ways. It is what we call a "contrapuntal" texture, meaning one in which each voice has an independent melody. In the case of a fugue, it is an imitative texture, meaning the different voices echo the same theme.
As you can hear, the subject can be broken down into little segments, each of which can be developed. Here is that theme:
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There is that opening scale segment in eighth notes, then the turn figure in sixteenths and finally the trill. Each of these is distinctive on its own. If you listen you will hear each voice, from top to bottom, state the theme. Then, when all three voices are sounding, an "episode" begins where that little turn figure is developed by being run through different harmonies while the other voices offer contrasting material. In each fugue Bach often chooses one technical device to use. In the first fugue in C major in this same book he uses the device of stretto that I talk about here. But in this fugue he features the technique of inversion. If you take a subject and turn it upside down you get its inversion. Here is how that looks:
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If you look in the lowest voice you can see the original subject, but if you look at the upper voice in the second measure, you can see that same subject inverted. This inverted version appears in the lower voice in the third measure and in the middle voice in the last measure in this excerpt. Now go back and listen to the fugue again and see if you can hear each time the subject appears and each time its inversion appears. This might seem a rather intellectual way to listen, but I find there is a unique aesthetic thrill to hearing different voices working together that you can experience in hundreds of pieces from Bach fugues to Haydn string quartets to Mozart symphonies and even up to Shostakovich.
So that's the Art of Listening for today. Hope it increases your musical enjoyment!
Terry Teachout has a substantial piece about the Metropolitan Opera's financial problems. He reveals one interesting detail that might be significant:
The Metropolitan Opera, America’s biggest opera company, sold a lot of tickets last season—660,500, to be exact. But, then, it had no alternative, for it had a lot of tickets to sell. The Metropolitan Opera House is a 3,800-seat monster of an auditorium, vastly bigger than it needs to be. Bayreuth, by contrast, seats 1,925; La Scala, 2,030; and the Vienna State Opera, 2,200. To keep its doors open, the Met must fill those extra seats, and it’s no longer doing so. Two decades ago, the company earned 90% of its potential box-office revenue. That figure has been declining steadily in recent years and dropped to 66% last season, an all-time low that’s been the talk of the opera world ever since it was disclosed in May. As a result, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, has been forced to raise ticket prices to an average of $158.50 per head. On Broadway, the average price is $103.86.
A 3800 seat hall is pretty hard to fill. On the other hand, we are talking about New York, a city of eight million people, a lot of whom are very wealthy indeed. Teachout mentions criticisms of the Met that focus on their old-fashioned repertoire and bloated, trashy productions. He also mentions "cost disease" which he describes as:
Cost disease is the term used by economists to describe the condition of a business in which wages go up without a corresponding increase in productivity, not because the workers are lazy but because the business itself is constituted in such a way as to preclude greater productivity. The classic example (no pun intended) is a string quartet. By definition it must employ four musicians, and it takes just as much work to perform a Haydn quartet today as it did two centuries ago. So far, nobody has figured out how to build a new kind of cello that’s easier to play, or sounds so much prettier that concertgoers will pay twice as much to hear it. At the same time, the real wages of musicians have gone up since the 18th century, and the demand for live performances of string quartets is shrinking.
The idea of "productivity" in classical music, or any art form for that matter, is just a bit odd. I recall a satirical piece years ago in which a productivity expert analyzed a performance of a Schubert symphony. I managed to find it online:
Schubert’s Productivity
A company president was given a ticket for a performance of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Since she was unable to go, she passed the invitation to the company’s Quality Assurance Manager. The next morning, the president asked him how he enjoyed it, and, instead of a few plausible observations, she was handed a memorandum which read as follows:
1. For a considerable period, the oboe players had nothing to do. Their number should be reduced, and their work spread over the whole orchestra, thus avoiding peaks of inactivity.
2. All twelve violins were playing identical notes. This seems unnecessary duplication, and the staff of this section should be drastically cut. If a large volume of sound is really required, this could be obtained through the use of an amplifier.
3. Much effort was involved in playing the demi-semiquavers. This seems an excessive refinement, and it is recommended that all notes should be rounded up to the nearest semiquaver. If this were done, it would be possible to use trainees instead of craftsmen.
4. No useful purpose is served by repeating with horns the passage that has already been handled by the strings. If all such redundant passages were eliminated, the concert could be reduced from two hours to twenty minutes.
In light of the above, one can only conclude that had Schubert given attention to these matters, he probably would have had the time to finish his symphony.
Heh!
If you want a more complete discussion of "cost disease" you can find it here. A sample:
The symphonies' financial problems are rooted in what has come to be known as the "cost disease," a term coined in 1966 by two then-Princeton economics professors, William Baumol and William Bowen, in a study of the economics of the performing arts. "The labor requirements for the music are set by the composer. For the most part, you don't toy around with that," Flanagan says. Furthermore, it takes 25 minutes to perform a Haydn symphony. Speeding up the playing or substituting a robot or digital device for one of the players doesn't appear on any music director's solution list, at least not yet.
I think this is a pretty clear example of what Gilbert Ryle called a "category mistake" where something is misunderstood by fundamentally placing it in the wrong category. In business, one must always be seeking to increase productivity by things like manufacturing more of the product in less time, with fewer materials and by lowering labor costs by using robotic manufacture. All very sensible things if you are making cars or widgets. But if your "product" is the performance of a symphony, then this is simply wrong-headed. So while the application of the term "cost disease" to symphony orchestras or opera may seem quite clever, it really fails to comprehend the nature of what is going on.
A symphony or an opera is an "aesthetic object" not a consumer product like an automobile or a fish stick. The production of it involves meeting aesthetic objectives which are different from the kind of productivity that we look for in most things. Believe me, no-one would be happier if the cost of symphony going went down every year as the quality went up, as we are used to with consumer products like the iPhone or the latest car design. But it is hard to see how this is even remotely possible with classical music.
If the standard business model is inappropriate then what would a better one look like? Perhaps we could compare attending the symphony to attending university. I don't want to overburden the comparison, but we do not typically think that the best measure of a university is the kind of raw productivity measured by simply how many students graduate with an A. We do have a sense that there are better and worse schools not because of any simple metric, but rather because of the quality of the education obtained. If you are studying with really outstanding scholars and critics in the humanities and Nobel prize-winning research scientists then you are getting a higher-quality education than you would with the rather more ordinary teachers at your local community college.
Similarly, high-quality aesthetic productions have to be measured by the aesthetic results, not by simple economic metrics. Look, it would be an easy task to throw together a budget grand opera in your high school gym. You hire a few local musicians, give them two rehearsals with a local conductor, throw together a pick-up chorus, paint some sheets for a backdrop, hit the regional conservatory for their leading voice students for your solo singers and there you have it. Cost, minimal. Aesthetic results, minimal as well. What would you pay for a ticket to this production?
The real question regarding the Met or any opera house or symphony orchestra is whether the aesthetic results are outstanding, merely adequate, or substandard. How demanding are the tastes of the audience? How affluent is the community? If you have a demanding audience and an affluent community then I can't see why they wouldn't be able to support a high-quality symphony or opera.
But, you know, we just seem to have an aversion to even admitting that aesthetics exist, let alone are worth paying for!
Here is a performance of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Trevor Pinnock. You can check out just how unproductive those oboists are:
Back in 1988, a magazine asked me to interview Zappa on the occasion of his campaigning for voter registration—not of leftie voters or libertarians, but voters of every stripe and flavor. (Zappa considered himself a conservative.) I showed up at his house in the Hollywood Hills at 10 p.m., as instructed by his publicist, and descended with him to his basement studio, where I made it clear that I wasn’t a music critic and claimed no special knowledge of his work. He made it equally clear that he thought the magazine had sent the wrong man. We talked awkwardly—almost painfully on my part—until I happened to mention my childhood delight in the music, if you could call it that, of the absurdist band leader and 1940s iconoclast Spike Jones. Suddenly Zappa’s face lighted up, I was his friend and the interview went brilliantly until just before dawn, when he said he was tired and thought he should take a nap.
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This is an interesting discussion between Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers about the problem of mediating the encounter with great works of art by inserting a political ideology. This is pretty much the view I have presented here in various places, but it is refreshing to hear their thoughts on it.
No word yet on whether she has started taking voice lessons.
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The Game of Thrones seems to be the most important drama on TV these days. Even the Wall Street Journal breathlessly summarizes each new episode. Early on I was quite impressed with it as the narrative breadth and really extraordinary production values, not to mention the fine acting, won me over. Those scenes in the wintry North? Wonder why they look so real? Virtually every scene in every movie and television show with snow and ice is utterly unconvincing (to me at least, who grew up in the North) because it is not real snow and ice. It is always flakes of paper or plastic and painted ice. But everything in the Game of Thrones is strikingly real looking (well, except maybe for the dragons--you really think those beasts can actually fly?). The scenes in the snow and ice were shot in Iceland for verisimilitude and damn, it works. But I started to lose interest after horrific scenes like the Red Wedding. I noticed that every character I liked was getting killed off (except for Tyrion) and I started to think the show was simply morally bankrupt: maximum shock value with no moral structure. But I was just looking at a few scenes on YouTube and I found one that almost restores my faith. Samwell is given free range of the Library and when he comes to the central part and sees the great stacks of books with a look of wonder, it reminds me of the first time I saw a big library. It was six floors of books, a million volumes and I looked about with wonder. If you don't have any reverence for the accumulated wisdom of the past, there is little hope for you (which is why today's universities are often worse than no education at all). But if you do...
The music industry is locked in an epic battle with YouTube, the most popular on-demand service, over the declining royalty rates the site pays and the difficulty in detecting copyrighted material from the mass of videos uploaded on the site.
It is doubtful that anyone would call the rates YouTube pays as being exorbitant or even adequate:
But YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc., with its more than 1 billion users, packs clout and reach that the industry can’t ignore. YouTube says it has paid about $3 billion to music companies since it launched a decade ago, and today half of its payout comes from user-generated content identified by its system called Content ID.
Although the Alphabet unit pays out more overall each year, it now pays an average of eight one-hundredths of a penny ($0.0008) per play, and less than six one-hundredths ($0.0006) of a penny for user-generated content, down roughly 20% from a year ago, people familiar with the matter said.
Woo-hoo!
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There is a new chamber orchestra in Canada. The Allegra Chamber Orchestra, based in Vancouver, has all women musicians, a woman conductor, and dedicates itself to performing works by women composers. No word on whether any specific percentages of Asian and First Nations players will be included. As an organization basically devoted to employing a certain category of musician, it sounds like a great idea. Of course, when it comes to attracting audiences they will have to compete just like anyone else. That might be just a tad difficult if they avoid male composers. I'm just sayin'.
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This past week was the fiftieth anniversary of two pretty important albums of the 60s. One was Freak Out! by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. A week before was the release of Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. I think that I used to own both of them on vinyl.
That gives us our double-barrelled (in honor of the fact that both of those were double albums) envoi for today. First, from Blonde on Blonde we have "Just Like a Woman", one of his finest songs:
Side four of Freak Out! is Frank Zappa's answer to Stravinsky and Debussy. The piece is called "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet (Unfinished Ballet in Two Tableaux)" and the first part is titled "Ritual Dance of the Child-Killer." Recall that Frank Zappa wrote another piece titled "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask" and you can see the depth of their influence (on the titles at least).
Our next post will return to our regularly scheduled program of classical classics.
Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb has warned the New York company could face bankruptcy in two or three years if it does not cut the cost of orchestra and chorus wages. Speaking on BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters programme, he suggested cutting 16 per cent of the Met’s $200m labour costs by changing work rules; orchestra and chorus members are currently paid for at least four performances per week when they often perform less.
He adds:
‘Putting on productions is expensive,’ he said. ‘What we have to do is make it less expensive – not by going back to the stone ages of opera theatre and having productions that no one will want to see, but by cutting down on the labour costs. The box office has not increased, it’s been flat which represents a shrinking playing field for opera – it’s not a secret in the US that the frequency of opera going is going down. We are getting a newer audience, a younger audience, but there aren’t enough new audience members to replace the old audience members who are dying off.’
I'm not sure how the typical reader might respond to this. I suspect that Norman Lebrecht over at Slipped Disc, based on past comments, would tend to blame it on Peter Gelb's being incompetent. Ordinary readers might think that the musicians are being greedy or why bother paying so much for a genre that no-one goes to anyway.
The truth is that opera, despite its enormous popularity with many listeners, is a form threatened by cultural trends. In some ways opera is the genre of classical music most likely to appeal to today's audiences because it is the only genre that incorporates the visual element as an inherent part of the art form. New and creative stagings of opera, while certainly attracting a certain amount of criticism, are often stunningly effective as I witnessed with the Teatro Real's production of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron last month in Madrid. But the flip side of that is that opera, especially elaborate modern productions, is extremely expensive. That production must have involved rebuilding much of the stage to incorporate a modest swimming pool. And then removing it for the next production, of course.
What the ordinary listener may not realize is that opera is an enormously complex undertaking involving the highly involved skills not only of the composer, the conductor, the leader of the chorus, the orchestral musicians, singers of the chorus and the stars, the soloists, but also the skills of a host of other workers behind the scenes. These include electricians, carpenters, plumbers, painters and all those who build and maintain the sets. Oh, and the designers of the production as well. Hearing that the annual labour costs for the Met are $200 million a year, you almost want to say, "is that all?" After all, $200 million dollars is the cost of one or two upmarket apartments in Manhattan.
Opera houses in Europe are very highly subsidized and always have been. Opera, from its birth in Italy in the late 16th century, was a highly sophisticated entertainment for the nobility. In the 19th century it became popular with the middle class as well, but it has never at any time been feasible economically. Unless you charge a thousand dollars a seat or perhaps more, no opera is going to break even. Opera in Europe has often been connected with national pride, one opera even started a revolution. So while there are certainly economic pressures there, the governments still seem willing to fund operas to a high level of quality. If the European Union succeeds in quashing the nation states still further, one wonders if this will finally abate.
But the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the jewel of American opera houses, has mostly thrived on private patronage. Are Peter Gelb's comments meant to imply that the fabulously wealthy opera-lovers of New York are less willing to donate or that they are dying out? It would seem so. But New York is continually attracting new hosts of wealthy people. Is it that they are less fond of opera? Seems so.
So it comes back, as always, to taste. If the population has little taste for classical music, they won't attend performances and won't support the art form. Educational outreach is important. In the past young people encountered classical music at home. Their parents played instruments or sang. They listened to recordings or the radio. They experienced live performances and listened to, studied or performed classical music in school. A lot of this has faded away leaving a core audience of enthusiasts. But until the culture changes course a bit, I suspect that times will be tough for classical music.
Here is an aria from Act I of Bizet's "Carmen." Elina Garanca (Carmen). Conductor: Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Production: Richard Eyre (2009). From the 2010 Live in HD transmission of the Metropolitan Opera:
A lot of the criticism of classical music turns on the characterization of its core repertoire as a "canon" in the sense that Harold Bloom uses the word in his fine book The Western Canon.
Wikipedia has an article on the Western Canon that has a good summary of the idea:
The Western canon is the body of books, music and art that scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. It includes works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, music, art and sculpture generally perceived as being of major artistic merit and representing the high culture of Europe. Philosopher John Searle suggests that the Western canon can be roughly defined as "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature".
The canon of books, including Western literature and Western philosophy, has perhaps been most stable, although expanding to include more women and minorities, while the canons of music and the visual arts have greatly expanded to cover the Middle Ages and other periods, once largely overlooked. Some examples of newer media such as cinema have attained a precarious position in the canon.
There has been an ongoing debate over the nature and status of the canon since at least the 1960s, much of which is rooted in critical theory, feminism, critical race theory, and Marxism. In particular postmodern studies has argued that the body of scholarship is biased, because the main focus traditionally of the academic studies of history and Western culture, has only been on works produced by European men.
But I come more and more to think that it is a poor word to use with regard to music, however accurate it may be in literature. This is prompted by getting back to, after a long hiatus, the excellent book Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism by Monroe C. Beardsley. In his chapter on Critical Evaluation he uses two useful terms: "Specific Canons" and "General Canons". These are specific and general principles about defects and merits in art. The word "canon" has two meanings, one used in music since the Middle Ages and one used in Biblical scholarship. The musical one is "a general law, rule, principle, or criterion by which something is judged." The other one is "a collection or list of sacred books accepted as genuine."
An example of the use of the word "canon" in music is the contrapuntal technique known as "canon". "Row, row, row your boat" is an example and the canon or rule there is that the second voice enters after the first phrase of the first voice, on the same pitch. In music there are all sorts of different canons. In the Goldberg Variations, every third variation is a canon. The first one is at the interval of a second, the second at the interval of a third and so on. The "rule" or structural principle changes with each canon.
But it should be clear already that the post-modern critique of the Classical canon in music, like so many other of their critiques, is based on an intellectual sleight of hand: music has never really had a "canon" in the sense of a "list of sacred works". Mind you, this is not for lack of trying for all sorts of purposes: to create an unchanging curriculum for music students, as an aid to marketing artists and performances, in order to simplify the repertoire for teaching purposes or in order to sell books and educational materials to the general public, for ideological reasons, and so on. But all this has always been in considerable tension with the reality which is that there is no canon and never was.
I can't speak for literature in which Shakespeare seems to rule absolutely as Harold Bloom thinks, but in music this kind of synoptic focus is hardly possible. First of all, our repertoire is huge and we have a great number of great composers. There are at least two or three candidates for the position of "Shakespeare" in music: J. S. Bach, W. A. Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Arguments over which one of these is greater have been going on for centuries.
Richard Taruskin, in his Oxford History of Western Music, talked about the difference between the repertory and the canon and how they began to diverge, for ideological reasons, in the 19th century (see pp 665 passim in vol. 3, op. cit.). I'll leave you to investigate his discussion which is quite illuminating as regards why this divergence became so marked in the 20th century. Basically, a "narrative history" concentrates on change, i.e. innovation, so it tends to neglect music written for the "repertoire", that is, simply to be listened to, not to fulfill some historical purpose. One interesting problem with this kind of "narrative history" is that it not only focuses on innovation, but it only focuses on certain kinds of innovation. Schoenberg, because of his twelve-tone theory, was a hugely important figure because his kind of innovations seems almost to have been made specifically to advance the narrative whereas the music of Steve Reich, even though it is perhaps even more innovative, is barely acknowledged because his innovations were mostly in the area of rhythm and meter, aspects of music that were not considered to be of historical importance.
Getting back to Beardsley, restricting the use of the word "canon" to just its meaning as a kind of counterpoint and to specific and general principles about defects and merits in works of art removes the problem of there being an inherent bias in its current use referring to a list of works that are "sacred" or "genuine". That was never a very accurate use in any case.
The repertory is always in flux, composers are growing or declining in popularity, new composers are coming along and fighting for performances, the market and performing conditions are constantly changing as well as are the kinds of ensembles finding work and what they choose to play. For all these reasons, while there is some stability to the repertoire--after all, great pieces of music and the appreciation of them does not change radically from one generation to the next, not usually--it is not a list of Works That Are Sacred, but just the repertoire that is chosen most frequently. Why? Well, not because it was written by Dead White Guys, but simply because it is good.
Therefore, all those pinched post-modern critiques about how the "canon" must be radically changed to include exactly the correct demographic numbers of women composers or simply done away with entirely, are really rather irrelevant, aren't they?
Let's listen to a nice piece from the repertory. Here is a lovely Sonata in D major for violin and continuo by Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre. The performers are Riccardo Masahide Minasi, violin and Salvatore Carchiolo, harpsichord:
