Introduction
Nowadays, we can not deny it, more and more people are approaching Classical Music by searching on Google "Relaxing Classical Music". The purpose is, as you can easily guess, to lie down for a few minutes, enjoy good music, maybe while sipping good tea, snacking, reading a book, running in a park and so on. Most of the results of this research are Chopin's Nocturnes or Mazurkas, Mozart Symphonies, Beethoven's Sonatas: take for example the so-called Moonlight Sonata. If you have searched at least once for "Relaxing Classical Music" on Google, you will have found thousands of playlists that contain this piece, despite being a piece with a tragic character and, contrary to what is commonly thought, not at all relaxing. I played it on the piano for you: you can listen to it below by pressing play, I'm sure you'll recognize it from the very first notes. Immediately after the song, you will find a banner where you can buy the paper score in the edition that I recommend: if you do, a small part of your purchase will go to support this blog.
Since I don't like to talk to you only about theories, let's take the "Sonata" as an example to start a concrete study on the subject. If you still do not know what a "Sonata" is, you can read the short article we have dedicated to this compositional style here. In this article, in fact, we will not deal with defining it, but we will try to take a further step by discovering in depth the background of this compositional form. This will make you understand, beyond the usual information that can be found anywhere on the web, why more and more people are looking for "Relaxing Classical Music", what songs and compositional styles emerge from this practice, and why this radically influences the common perception that one has of the "Classical" musical genre. If you read the article until the end, you will realize how much those who listen to the playlists of "Relaxing Classical Music" are similar to the ancient listener of the eighteenth century who had the opportunity to listen live to certain compositions that today we find inserted in the form of recording in the playlists we listen to.
For whom and for what purpose a sonata?
The Piano Sonata was designed, along with other forms of chamber music that fill the playlists of "Relaxing Classical Music", especially for amateurs or for people who read music for their pleasure and interest. Usually, these performances took place not with the sense of the modern concert, like "I studied something, and then I perform it in the theatre, auditorium etc.", but it was a moment that took place mostly at first sight: the performer was the one who simply read the Music. Music reading was the most practiced thing at the time. Only rarely did musicians study a piece. For example, in a letter Beethoven is worried because some musicians have to perform the Quartet op. 125, very complex: to reassure him they tell him a phrase like "Do not worry Master, we have played it twice !". Today it would be inconceivable for us to rehearse a Beethoven Quartet only twice: before taking it to a concert, most of the professionals of our day try it for months and months repeating it hundreds of times. You can already notice a certain difference between the approach to musical performance in the eighteenth century and that of the present day … But let's move on.
"Relaxing Classical Music"? Often Not For Connoisseurs
Contrary to what the titles of the playlists of "Relaxing Classical Music" suggest, in the cultured field, in auditoriums, in theaters, when a pianist has to play in public he knows that in most cases his performance can be anything but "relaxed". There are many contradictions between the way in which Classical Music is made by professionals and the way through which it is then enjoyed. The Sonata that I just made you hear, above, is considered among the most famous pieces in the History of Music: yet when a pianist shows up at a concert with a Beethoven Sonata scheduled, the whole audience is in a concentrated listening mode, as if they were about to discover that composition for the first time. The way we listen to this type of composition hides a contradiction: it was born for a certain mode of listening, but another one was adopted over the centuries. With this second consideration, we begin to understand more and more that "Relaxing Classical Music" was not born yesterday, but on the contrary represents a custom, a way of listening and enjoying the "Classical" musical genre very widespread among very specific categories of listeners. Let's see which ones.
Professional Listener VS Amateur
Many times, when a Conservatory teacher gives precise indications on the score of a Sonata and performs some at a concert, he may have the fear of not doing well in everything that Beethoven had written. In reality, among the public today there are very few connoisseurs, very few who can notice the minimal nuances of execution on which a classical musician works for months, sometimes years. To this, we add a historical fact, which is that at the time of Beethoven, all this attention was not there because the Sonata was born for private pleasure and there was often only a bit of preliminary sight-reading without paying too much attention to mistakes. Beethoven himself was known to be a great improviser, able to create at the time great piano constructions: yet in the professional field, outside the mostly amateur research on "Relaxing Classical Music", his music today is more than any other music which everyone must lend a truly absolute bond of fidelity. Everything that is written is law. It almost seems that musicians have become the "priests" of Music, and can say: "Just as we would never change the words of the Bible, we would never change the notes of a Beethoven Piano Sonata!". Yet Beethoven, as we have said, was one who loved to improvise continuously: this is a first, strong contradiction; we dedicate to Beethoven a fidelity to the text that he himself would never have used. A second, not negligible historical contradiction, is represented by the fact that music at the time of Beethoven was spread through precise listening habits: while listening to music everything was done. For example, in the nineteenth century the violinist Ludwig Spohr, a contemporary of Beethoven, every time he was called to play in aristocratic salons complained that everyone played cards and the musicians had to play the piano so as not to disturb them. You could be called to play with the recommendation never to play loud so as not to disturb those present! In the theater we talked, we ate, we did business, we met people. Everything happened. To conclude, although Beethoven's music was born in a very informal era, today professional musicians put it at the centre of a sacred attention of listening.
The Historical Perspective
The first thing we need to understand is that the idea we have today of the way we listen to Beethoven's music is devoid of any historical truth. Only with romantic listening, so in the late nineteenth century, the idea of the concert as a religious moment, almost sacred, was born: when you enter an auditorium, you walk in with religious silence, then you sit exactly as it happens in the church: all equal in front of the Music. It's not like in ancient theatre, where there were positions based on who was more or less socially important. The auditorium chair must be comfortable, you must be able to relax while listening. There must be little light, every color is distracting: it is no coincidence that the piano is black and white. At the time of Beethoven, all of this did not exist: the idea that the piano itself could be devoid of colours is a horrible idea.
Even dressing up as a concert, all black, is something that comes from listening to the Romantic period, and it did not exist before. In addition, only recently have we been trying to return to non-exclusive forms of the concert: it is not obvious that the piano is on stage and the others are all down in the audience; you could listen to the music around the piano, the pianist could talk to the audience. In the eighteenth century, there was not all this concert formalism: there was no idea that the piece performed was a sacred text, to be respected with this canon that we consider today. The very concept of audience in Beethoven's time was very fluid. The paying public existed only on very rare occasions.
The Academies
There were so-called academies at the time of Beethoven, public entertainment that constituted very rare events. And above all, they were things that we will struggle to conceive because they lasted even six hours: these were among those rare events we talked about above in which it could happen that the public paid to participate. The academies served to make themselves known and to try to acquire private students and job opportunities. More frequently musical gatherings took place in the palaces of the aristocracy, in the living rooms.
What Is A Musical Genre?
Classical Music is a musical genre. But some musicologists also tend to define what we describe as "Relaxing Classical Music" as a musical genre. In fact, they are divided into two schools of thought: the first school of thought is the introspective one, for example John Frow argues that genre is given by a set of highly organized conventional constraints for the production and interpretation of the meaning of a composition. In other words, depending on how it is made and how a song is interpreted we can say that it belongs to a certain genre. So, to understand the genre I have to see how the music is made. But there is another school of thought, more important, more affirmed, which says something else: it is an extrospective school of thought. Franco Fabbri, for example, says that the genre is a set of musical events whose path is governed by a precise set of socially accepted rules. It means that the genre is given not by how the music is made, but by how the music is listened to. In other words, gender is a reflection of social rules. So since hundreds of people search for "Relaxing Classical Music" on Google and make similar use of it, we can define, according to this current of thought, a musical genre that we will call "The musical genre of Relaxing Classical Music". Indeed, in the eighteenth century every musical form had its own precise social function: as far as the Sonata is concerned, certainly a function of personal recreation. We begin to understand that it is no coincidence that we find this musical genre among the thousands of playlists of "Relaxing Classical Music". Between pleasure and personal fun, these "Sonatas" were published, which were bought by people who put the score on the instrument and had pleasure in reading them. This is the first reason why they are born. After that we can say that the piano in the eighteenth century was not studied with exercises, with scales, with technique, this will be born as a virtuosic specialization, but at the time of Beethoven the piano is studied through the musical repertoire, that is, the music written as it is. The Sonatas had an educational function. Through the Sonatas music was taught, not only was piano technique taught, but it was taught to think about music. My Master of Analysis at the Conservatory told me that all of us pianists should always have Beethoven's sonatas on the instrument and cyclically read them one after the other because this reading tells us, teaches us a lot about thinking about music. How you think about music. In such a specialized era as ours we are not used to thinking of wasting time making all 32 sonatas inaccurately: we focus on one and try to do that well. But this concept denies the sonatas their value as a cognitive instrument of music. Reading them all I can understand how Music is made as a whole, as a subject of study in the broadest and most general sense.
Who were the "amateurs"?
The amateurs to whom Beethoven turned his attention were the so-called amateurs or connoisseurs. The interesting thing was precisely that in a single figure the performer and the listener were concentrated. The listener and the performer were one and the same. The music was designed to be listened to by playing them and played listening to them, they were two fundamental aspects. This way of living the Piano Sonata created a very intimate and collected situation, a bit like when you read a book in a group and you are all respectively focused on yourself. This dimension of intimate and almost soliloquy reading, that is, a speaking to oneself and with oneself, invited the composer to use subtleties that in other music he would not have used. As if to say: if I imagine someone who reads poems and writes poems for her to read, I imagine the intimate and collected dimension of her reading and I am led to make more precise considerations, not generic. I would go looking for subtle and unconventional expressive contents: the intimate dimension of the sonata leads Beethoven to dig into the subtle musical expressions. The amateur in Beethoven's time was both reader, performer and audience.
The Women Of The Aristocracy
The women of the aristocracy were the first recipients of this kind of music since most of them were educated in musical culture as a fundamental aspect of life. And the aristocrats devoted themselves to Music in particular through the piano and singing. More rarely women played the harp, they certainly did not play wind instruments that were considered inconvenient. Few women played string instruments. The piano was a typical instrument of female education, and even the sonatas were sometimes written with the wording: sonatas for the use of ladies.
Beethoven's "intimates"
The painting you see above represents one of the paintings that make us understand what Beethoven had introduced into listening habits. Each of the close friends who are around Beethoven's music represents one of the ways of listening according to the romantic perspective, which would have been born from Beethoven. There are those who listen analytically, on the right; there are those who dream with Music, turned backwards in their imagination; there is the one with his head in his hands and deeply concentrated in the music, who holds his head as if to show the fatigue of deep understanding; then there is the standing character, who would be the publisher, the one who wants to make a profit from Beethoven's Music and looks at all the others standing with a skeptical face. Then there is a classical bust that gives us an idea of classicism, of fixity of grandeur of the past and then there is Beethoven who looks at us, who looks beyond, who looks at us and in some way questions us: this is the photograph of the ideal of listening to Beethoven's Sonatas with the author alive, and it is the photograph of how starting from him many paradigms of musical listening will change.
Conclusions
In this article we have discovered where the use of associating the term "Relaxing" with Classical Music comes from, why it happens even when the song in question does not directly convey a character of relaxation (we saw it with the Moonlight Sonata) and what are the ancestors of those who search on Google "Relaxing Classical Music". If you follow us, we will delve further into the topic in subsequent articles. For the moment, see you in tomorrow's!
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