# Parallel timeline of classical and popular music



## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

What do you think of this?

I was thinking about parallels in development of popular and classical music, and I found out some interesting analogies/similarities.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

"Faraway Places with Strange-Sounding Names". Like a pulse, popular music discovers and rediscovers Romanticism, or at least that aspect of Romanticism that evokes and fixates upon lost cultures or remote and strange locales. WWII triggered a wave of such, as both service people and their families became aware of a much wider world. The late 1940s and early 1950s again saw a rediscovery, with songs like Nat King Cole's _Nature Boy_ and a spate of songs calling up visions of the Old West (_Ghost Riders in the Sky, Tumbling Tumbleweeds, Water_, some of them reborn from the 1930s). So it was not unexpected that Rock would also rediscover Romanticism. The Brits found it first, with songs like _Those Were the Days, Theme for an Imaginary Western, The Fountain of Salmacis_. A little later it crossed the pond to North America and _Cortez the Killer, St. Charles, Xanadu_ (Rush). Not a parallel timeline in any way with Classical Music, but a phenomenon that, in its own way, has provided a hopeless Romantic like me many decades of musical pleasure!


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## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

What I meant with the parallel timeline? Of course there are no real correspondences between various stages in development in popular and classical music, but still there are some similarities.
Similarities and analogies here refer mainly to the stages of development of classical and popular music, rather than the similarity in style of corresponding periods.
I think the most striking resemblance is between so called common practice period in classical music, which is around 1650 - 1915, and golden age of popular music which is from around 1950 or 1960 till some time in early 1990s. 
In this period there are 2 periods:
first is 1950 - 1970, in that period rock is definitely developing, becoming more complex, more sophisticated, and maybe even "improving" - in classical music this would cover the period from the start of Baroque till death of Beethoven, it covers all 3 big names. Split up of Beatles on one side, and death of Beethoven on the other, are sort of peaks, of popular and classical music, respectively.
Then comes Romanticism and Progressive rock, etc... Both periods are characterized by extreme ambitiousness, taking music very seriously, etc... But both sometimes fall short of the classics that came before, that is, before 1970 and 1827.
Still both musics are going relatively strong and producing many great works, and it goes roughly till 1910s in classical music and till 1990s in popular music.

After that in classical music there is a lot of extreme modernism, atonality and stuff on one hand, and somewhat derivative neo-styles on the other hand. In popular music there are similarly very derivative pop songs, on one hand, and countless new, increasingly obscure and experimental subgenres on the other hand which are kind of analogue to modern movements in classical music. 

So generally, the development of popular music was much quicker, but I think it passed through similar stages as classical did.


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## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

Regarding current period in both classical and popular music, I guess (and hope), there are many gems, they are just not so easy to find. Strugeon's Law is quite strong these days.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

ZJovicic said:


> Regarding current period in both classical and popular music, I guess (and hope), there are many gems, they are just not so easy to find. Strugeon's Law is quite strong these days.


Your thesis is interesting, as it addresses the (theoretical) evolutionary stages through which art forms have passed over the past many centuries. And perhaps the evolution of painting would show a similar pattern. The situation now, though, is that all of the arts today are drawn irresistably into the state of constant flux that typifies the New Stasis, wherein every every conceivable flower blooms among countless other flowers, and large-scale, easily identifiable patterns are lost in the blur.


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## The Deacon (Jan 14, 2018)

Sorry for the derail, but,

The nymph, Salmacis, attempting the rape of Hermaphroditus:
Sure it is an example to a facet of Romanticism.
Just that I think you could have thought up a less violent one.


(Myself, The Deacon, thinks of Romanticism in a rather gentler light.)


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## Vronsky (Jan 5, 2015)

Mahlerian once wrote a really nice post on TC about the parallel between the classical tradition and popular music. Unfortunately, I can't find it.


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