The development of opera, oratorio, and the cantata gave a prominence to vocal music throughout the Baroque era (c. 1600–1750) that made it equal in importance to instrumental music, with which these forms were closely allied. But instrumental chamber and independent orchestral ensembles, as they exist today, also had their beginnings during this period. A highly significant development of the late 18th century was the definitive appearance of the modern sonata (whether in the form of the solo and duo sonata, piano trio, string quartet, concerto, or symphony) with the Viennese classicists Haydn and Mozart and, later, Beethoven.
Since a vocal text is likely to be confused with intrinsic musical meaning, or at least to divert attention from a preoccupation with it, it is not surprising that aesthetic theory has followed on the emergence of an autonomous instrumental music requiring greater concentration on the sound itself, its colour and intensity, and the intelligibility (in terms of tonal organization alone) of a composition. Moreover, the very concept of listening as an attentive (and sometimes rigorous), serious, and necessary activity of the music lover gained acceptance only slowly, following the inauguration of public concerts, and is still vigorously resisted. The expectation that the art should provide enjoyment without effort is, indeed, widespread and accounts for much of the opposition to new and demanding idioms. But even for well-disciplined and eager listeners there is the problem of quantity: they must cope as best they can with what Langer has called “the madhouse of too much art.” If more effort is required, more discrimination is also needed. In music education, articulate voices ask that teaching be centred more upon qualitative aspects of the art (“aesthetic education”), less upon music making as an activity. This concern for musical value appears to reflect a more intensive search for meaning, which is not likely to be the exclusive property of a particular style or era, nor is it to be sought in an indiscriminate acceptance or rejection of novelty per se.
A pronounced pedagogical interest developed in various genres of popular music, such as rock, soul, and similar idioms with great numbers of followers, especially among the young, whose gigantic festivals generated feelings of religious exaltation. The texts of the songs are highly emotional and deal with a broad range of themes, from political protest to calls for a loud and lively dance party; accompaniments are provided by guitars, keyboards, and percussion instruments and are electronically amplified. Music educators were attracted by the intrinsic structural values of this music, especially its distinctive rhythmic and modal characteristics, its texts, and the qualitative levels that may be distinguished. A music so vital and widespread, moreover, was deemed by many to be worth studying in school. In the mid-20th century the rock music movement emerged as a musical-sociological phenomenon of large proportions. Within a few decades, programs in popular music had been established in many postsecondary institutions, and by the early 21st century musicologists, music theorists, and educators in various disciplines were actively involved in the study of virtually every major genre of popular music across the globe. Music and worldview
Again, music proves its protean susceptibilities in the service of disparate worldviews. Among humanist psychologists (such as the Americans Gordon Allport and Abraham Maslow) music may be one among other means toward self-fulfillment, integration, self-actualization; for aesthetic existentialists (such as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre) it is yet another crucial department of choice and freedom; for spiritual existentialists (such as the philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber) it transmits transcendent overtones. For expressionists (such as the composers Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, and René Leibowitz) music carries austere, and sometimes doctrinaire, moral imperatives. Theodor Adorno, a composer-philosopher and pupil of Alban Berg, wrote powerfully of these and spoke for an awareness of dazzling lucidity, but the tone, notwithstanding his humour, was one of obligation. Only the expressionists, among those mentioned here, were committed primarily to music, though Adorno, in particular, considered music and musicians always in interaction with their environments. The aesthetic concept of play is virtually absent, except among such humanists as Maslow. With Sartre, no less a humanist, the tone was one of responsibility. Many educators long held the explicit aim (at least in part because of a misinterpretation of John Dewey) of presenting the content of a discipline as “fun”; the concern for aesthetic education, an area of great interest to Dewey himself, eschewed this trivial view. But play, in the aesthetic sense, follows rules, as information theory has demonstrated; even controlled aleatory composition observes some limits. And the play may be very serious indeed, as in the important 20th-century atonal style known as 12-tone technique, practiced by the Viennese expressionists and their successors.
Tonality and meaning
The most troublesome problem not only for the untutored listener but also for the professional musician has been, in much contemporary work, the loss of explicit tonality, and this accounts for the tardy popular response to Schoenberg and his schooclass="underline" the vocabulary is esoteric. Nineteenth-century compositions did, indeed, stretch the tonal system to its outer limits, but it is now clear that Wagner and Richard Strauss, and even the early Schoenberg, had not broken from it. As for Claude Debussy, his use of “exoticisms” was filigree upon a secure tonal base. So were such practices as the juxtaposition of keys by Stravinsky. This is not to say that the tonality of the Western world, fecund though it has been, is superior or more natural than other systems. Ethnomusicology has proved this to be a parochial view, though there are still those who champion harmonic practices based on the physical laws governing overtones—as Western tonality is—as the only “natural” source of development. It should not be irrelevant, however, to inquire if any folk music exhibits atonal characteristics.
Richard Strauss.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Tonality in Western music, though a significant aspect, cannot be considered the crux of musical meaning. The tone rows that are used in the 12-tone compositions of Schoenberg, like major and minor tonality in earlier music, are a technical substratum and must be no more explicit in the finished work than the chemical makeup of pigments in the Mona Lisa. The devices selected may affect the comprehensibility or accessibility of the work, but they are not, per se, the determinants of its worth or quality. Similarly with musical colour, or timbre; the 19th century produced a great profusion of compositions, particularly in the orchestral repertoire (e.g., works by Liszt and Berlioz) that exploited the unique sonorities of instruments; control of volume was, in itself, a rich source of colour. Works with literary or other extramusical associations were excellent vehicles for sonorous effects, but colour, like tonality, must be evaluated in musical context. Most notably, Langer, among other 20th-century aestheticians, regarded words themselves as musical, rather than discursive, ingredients; they are “assimilated” by the song. Gordon Epperson The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica